When Google updated their doorway page algorithm and guidelines it confused webmasters. The definition was not as clear, and honestly, most SEOs still are fuzzy on what a doorway page is.
This is so much so that most SEOs had no clue the new doorway page algorithm actually launched.
This morning I spotted a thread at Google Webmaster Help where one webmaster was being smart and wanted to 'out' the Hilton hotel for having landing pages for each hotel on the main hilton web site as well as a secondary URL in the format of hiltoncityname.com.
Top Contributor ETS responded to that, which Google's Eric Kuan from the search quality team marked as the best answer, as follows:
Those aren't doorways, no. There's nothing deceptive or manipulative that I can see. An example of doorways is when you have a website with 200 pages on it, all of which have the same basic text but with place names switched out on each page ("Find a taxi in London"/"Find a taxi in New York City"). The pages are designed to rank separately, catch keyword searches, but funnel all the traffic to one destination.Whether this way of doing things is a good idea is another matter - since you effectively have two different indexed pages/sites (both are indexed) competing with one another. It would generally make more sense to have one of the URLs 301 redirecting to the other - and making one strong site instead of two.
So maybe use this as your doorway page definition even though it isn't described too well in the help docs.
Forum discussion Google Webmaster Help.
