What is doorway?

Earlier I talked about BMW and Ricoh (not Nikon) which were banned by google because of setting up doorway in order to increase relevance in search results.

So what is doorway?

Here are some pointers for more information.

http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2006-02-01-n31.html
http://www.theregister.com/2006/02/06/bmw_removed/

In short, just taking BMW as an example, they created a page that was embedded with a lot of text strings about "second-hand car" (in german). Search engine like google will rank the page with very high relevance if people look up second-hand car. When a user visits the page, the site will re-direct to another page which basically has very little to do with second-hand cars.

There re 2 schools of thoughts. There are supporters that those web sites who "cheat" should be penalized. Banning them from search results is a proper act.

Another opposite view is that the search engines aren't smart enough to distinguish. They should be improved to avoid the problem instead of just penalizing the web content owners.

I am indifferent about the penalty but from a user's standpoint, the ban does improve search quality.