Talking about all the optimized digg-like sites?

Defining a doorway is a really difficult thing to do if you ask me. I have one client who I am working with at the moment who has what I would call doorway pages, he had them when he came to me but they were not optimised. I have now started working with him on adding lots of unique content to each of the gateways, to make them more rank worthy. To me gateways are where you have lot's of identical pages, just with the one keyword changed and no original content. I have seen people do it, come up with a sales pitch page and then replicate it 500 times, each one optimised for a differnt county or town. I have never seen anyone get penalized for this, the question is where do Google draw the line and how much original content does there need to be.

i say good riddance, doorway pages were never anything but an annoyance anyhow

each page is optimized for a specific keyword or phrase...then funnel users to a single destination.
Folks this is a landing page. Now Google wants people to stop making targeted landing pages?

A landing page is not the same as a door way page.

A door way page usually makes no sense to a visitor – it is created to exploit search engine algorithm; albeit over the years its effectiveness has diminished.

A landing page will have clearly defined headings, copy and a call to action. Also, it will have pages within the site linking to it. This page will be built for good user experience. User as in human.

Do not misconstrue what Google are saying.

DITTO on Rob's Statement

I agree with Rob and since he said hit it on the head
I will repeat it again below. I have use what I call landing pages to get certian items that I am selling indexed into the search engines to better be found for those types of searches. I mainly did this because of the way many old shopping carts where set up to take one right into the cgi script. Since I felt the search bots would not index the cart well I set up those html landing pages to get better help in getting indexed by the search engines for content on those landing pages where one could then land and take action as Rob says.
I still use them today and will contine to use them since I still use one of the older shopping carts on the web and still feel that a hand code html page as stil being the best way to get found by any search bot big or small

Rick

as posted by Rob Abdul
A landing page is not the same as a door way page.

A door way page usually makes no sense to a visitor – it is created to exploit search engine algorithm; albeit over the years its effectiveness has diminished.

A landing page will have clearly defined headings, copy and a call to action. Also, it will have pages within the site linking to it. This page will be built for good user experience. User as in human.

Do not misconstrue what Google are saying.

The definition doesnt really define exactly what the doorway page could look like. for example our website does have pages which are catering to specific keywords, now these pages are optimised with relavance to the content and the services we have to offer. I doubt if they are considered as doorway pages but they could be found by google under this definition. .... ! Above Rick has commented about how it can be a misconstrue what google are saying. But would a bot/crawler consider that or would it give a minus 1(value for example) to the page...?