The Origin of Doorway Pages

[Delimanran]

One thing I've always been curious about is the origin of doorway pages. Who originally invented them? I'm not niave enough to believe I was the one who first thought of it but I do have an interesting background story for whoever is interested.

It was my freshman year in highschool around spring/summer of 1996. I had some weird entertainment/wav file website (kegger.com - and no i dont' still own that domain). Back then Webcrawler and Altavista ruled the search engines. I was reading a lot on the limited world on how search engines worked when I thought "wait a minute why should I ruin my page by putting this crap into my pages why not just create separate pages that are perfect for these keywords that I want and have them forward to my main site." So I manually made about 20 of them and they worked so damn well that I started making more and more and more. Before this time I've never heard of this being done and never seen it(althought it probably did exist it just was so private i never got to see it). Eitherway they worked extremely well and was producing a ton of traffic for me on every keyword I would use. I started calling them my "hitwhores" (haha..hey i was only 14 at the time. gimmie a break). After a couple weeks I recieved an email from Altavista asking me whats the deal with these pages that were ranking well for extremely popular words like music and download, yet didn't do anything but forward to my main site. I told them what they were for. They responded and told me I need to take them off my site and that my site would be banned. I told them in words less professional to get lost and that if they did I would just copy the files over to a bunch of other servers like Geocities. They emailed me back and said they would sue. I told them go ahead, and by the way I'm only 14 and all my stuff is located on servers in other countries. They didn't respond.

Then about two days later I noticed on their url submit page they had a link that said "Attention webmasters dont' do this or you will be banned"(or somethign along those lines). I then clicked on the link and it described perfectly what I had done in detail, they even changed my wonderful term for it into something more politically correct like doorway pages. Infact those idiots basically posted instructions to the world. I emailed them and told them they were idiots for doing that and now everybody was going to do it. They never responded. Needless to say it wasn't too long after that, that it became a big popular thing and ruined SERPS for a long time after.

Anyways thats my story, I rarely tell it since no one would probably believe it. Eitherway thats my story and I'm sticking to it. I know the saying that says no idea is an original one. So I'm sure someone else thought of it and did it before I did, but it's nice to think that I at least helped make it popular.

Does anyone else have any stories involving the origin of Doorway pages. They are a good part of the internet history after all and I would be really interested to hear them.

Thanks,
Eli

[Maximilian]

Originally Posted by Delimanran

One thing I've always been curious about is the origin of doorway pages. Who originally invented them? I'm not niave enough to believe I was the one who first thought of it but I do have an interesting background story for whoever is interested.

First off, Eli, welcome to WPW Discusion Forums!

Second, I thoroughly enjoyed your tale of teenage Internet ingenuity. Your casual self-effacing within the story provides it a distinct sense of credibilty. I am an avid history buff on almost any subject of war, conquest or inventive human institutions, so even if not true, I'm the sucker to fall for it.

btw - I, as an internet entrepeneur since 1996, encountered many "cease & desist" orders from manufacturers & competitive vendors. My response has been the similar F.U. tactic you chose - thank heaven for the wisdom of a few US Supreme Court Judges in 1998 or I would not be able to afford the laptop on which I now pen this post.

Cheers!
Max