A Gateway Page is a page created exclusively for search engines to improve the SEO of a website. In other words, it is an invisible page for Internet users but taken into account by Google’s crawler.
A gateway page is usually stuffed with keywords and links. Its sole purpose is to seduce Google algorithms. They are therefore extremely well referenced and appear in the first positions of results.
But a user who clicks on this result does not arrive on the page in question. It is automatically redirected to the homepage or another page of the website, or even to another site.
Almost all SEOs use this technique to optimize the visibility of a website.
Fortunately, this is no longer the case today. Indeed, gateway pages are now considered an abusive SEO method and are penalized by Google.
The sites which use this technique are downgraded or blacklisted by the search engine. It is a Black Hat SEO strategy.
In any case, using Gateway pages in SEO is discouraged and does not offer any positive results in the medium or long term.
How does a Gateway page work?
When a user navigates from one page to a results page, they will usually be redirected to another page via a page refresh.
Other types of redirection include the use of Javascript and server-side redirection from the server configuration file. Some gateway pages can be dynamic pages generated by programming languages such as Perl and PHP.
Gateway pages are frequently easy to identify because they are designed primarily for search engines rather than humans.
Sometimes an open door page is copied from another high-ranking page, but this is likely to cause the search engine to detect the page as a duplicate and exclude it from search engine listings.
How to optimize the SEO of your website without using Gateway pages?
Since Google penalizes gateway pages today, it is better to avoid them and use white hat SEO techniques.
To naturally boost the SEO of your website:
Can a Gateway Page be beneficial?
Unfortunately, there are still consultants who claim that “Gateway pages” are the only way to get to the top of Google and recommend buying expensive and useless software to make them faster.
However, all of these pages will only create ineffective search engine results, making the search process even less effective.
Also, these magical software packages demand a lot from you, the user. You have to suggest keywords, key phrases, keyword density, template stuffing, meta tags, etc.
In the search engine optimization process, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Every page needs to be optimized for search, which means attracting the search engines who are looking.