I was having a think this morning when I was having my morning walk around the park that doorway / portal sites recently have been getting bashed a lot and are said to not work for optimisation purposes anymore, I would be interested to see if anyone has some better data on this as it seems to me that it does work its just most people dont want you to know it.
Doorway and portal sites are generally classed as being spammy and useless for most people but a well made choice selection of portal sites could actually boost your rankings quite considerably. If you take for example a loans and mortgages company, you know straight away that the target market is massive and getting above the big boys for any search term other than “my company loans in london” is going to be a complete nightmare. This is where a good selection of doorway and portal sites can come in handy.
Lets set this up so you can see how it works.
Doorway Site 1: Blogging Site
Doorway Site 2: Community Forums
Doorway Site 3: Mortgage / Loan Advice Website
Doorway Site 4: Debt Consolidation Advice Site
Doorway Site 5: Comparing other rates to ours site.
Looking at that list there is a large selection of different things that could work to our advantage, number 1 the blogging site will give you the opportunity to posts news articles, press releases and other things which you can link to different internal pages of your website, the 2nd option the community forums are even better as it enables you to put a link to your homepage from every page of the site building a massive amount of relevant inbound links, also the content is written for you by your visitors so there are never any problems with updating content, the forum would simply need to be managed every now and again.
Numbers 3/4/5 are the best ones, looking at them you have everything you could ever require from inbound links, each page of those website will have a different theme and be optimised for the keywords on it, you in tern would have a banner link at the top of everypage on those sites and a text link at the bottom of the main content of each site. Obviously the anchor text and the page you redirect it to will have a massive overall bearing on the way your site performs.
Simply put, if you can get approximaly 200 links into each of the portal sites by any means, even link exchanges then its possible to make a massive impact on the main website in a short space of time, I know it works because I have done it before, I managed to get a brand new website to number 1 in Google for pay per click in about 2 months. The main site itself was just a test site so it obviously got removed within a few days but the point is doorway sites work…
Dont be put off if a SEO company offers to make them for you, as a matter of course I generally produce sites like this as part of an SEO campaign however all the sites are kept by me at the end of it so I can do what I like with them, make sure if an SEO company does doorway sites you have ownership rights in your contract, it can be a unpleasant suprise when your traffic drops to 10% of previous because all links to your main site are removed.
Further discussion about doorway sites is available by clicking HERE.