Search Engine Optimisation Web Log (BLOG)
Editor: Matt Paines

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Should I Create Gateways?

This is a question we are still being asked about. Gateway pages have long since been a method of creating optimised content. Trouble is they often have content copied from other places on a site. As the search engines will deep link into the most relevant page would it not have been better to just optimise the original page?

Gateways are a lazy way of optimisation, make your site content accessible to the search engines, optimise it, and build your authority and anchor text. Google has some very good filters for picking up sites that use gateways, duplicate or near duplicate content or sites that are interlinked on the same c block
(eg IP 192.168.101.102) of a server, not to mention if you do get a top listing some webmaster somewhere could report your activities.

The way to the top of the search engines is not about trying to fool them by using Blackhat Spam Techniques like gateways but if you are going to all the effort of crafting unique content to attract a good optimisation score, wouldn't it be better to implement it within the site?

Getting ranked for a keyphrase is about informing the search engines what your site is about, not how many times you can repeat a word in the text. If a search engine spider cannot navigate a website it'll never understand the site. So it'll never be able to give it a high enough score for relevancy or ranking.

The critical elements are:

Subject Matter of Site
External Links to Linking Pages
Link Popularity of Site in Relevant Community
Header Title/Description Tag
Use of Emphasized text
Link Anchor Text
Keyword in Document Text
Document Accessibility
Internal Page Links to Document
Global Link Popularity of Site

A good tool to analyse against these elements is at Lemonpod SEO tools, whilst the Page Analyser doesn't have all the answers it has a scoring mechanism that indicates how well a page might be received from a content point of view.

M.P

22.05.2007 Caspar
Good job! Your site is great!