Mentioned earlier by CBP, "Doorway" pages are a no-no. Do you think it's possible for Google to have different standards depending on the PR of a site? For instance, would a low-ranking site get booted for using doorway pages, whereas such an infridgement would be ignored on "highly-valued" sites?

Case-in-point:

I work in the internet QA department for a very prominent, national marketing company (my day job). There is a Web Developer here who recommended I use "Dummy pages" to increase traffic when I asked him a question about SEO for a site I'm working on: www.gpitech.org.

He admitted using the following technique on our company's website:

The content of each dummy page would be informative and focused on a specific keyword, while containing several links from the dummy page to the homepage, but not the other way around. A link to the Dummy page would only appear on the sitemap (among dozens of other links) and this way, he claims, it could not be considered spamming. He also claims that because the dummy page would have links to the homepage, both the dummy page AND the homepage would show up in search results on the targeted keywords.

Would you agree that this is not spamming? Do you see this technique as being any different from the "Doorway" page mentioned above? Although it is relevant content to the site, the "dummy page" is designed specifically for better search engine rankings.

I'm having trouble optimizing a site because the authors are reticent to change the wording to accomodate the use of keywords I have recommended. But, the wording of their pages now is not SEO-friendly.

This dummy-page idea would give me an out: I could write some keyword-friendly pages on my own that are informative AND designed to attract traffic to the site, which I'm sure users would find very informative once they find it. The advantage is that the content would not need to be scrutinized to the same degree as the main pages of the site, they would be relevant to the content, but they would not appear in the site's main navigation, so they would not be highly visible pages.

This also raises the issue, if this is in fact spamming, that a large company can get away with it because my co-worker says that Google rankings jumped directly as a result of implementing this strategy.

I greatly appreciate any suggestions you might have.

Thank you & have a great day!
Paul.