What are doorway pages?
Doorway pages: Google's four examples, and how to test a family
Doorway pages are pages built to rank for many similar searches that send people on to a less useful destination. Google's spam policies call this doorway abuse and give four examples, including pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page. City and comparison pages aren't doorways by nature. They become doorways when each page has nothing of its own.
When TechFabric sets Heddle up on your site, every location or comparison page is measured against its siblings on each build, and one that repeats them fails before it ships. How an engagement works.
Google's definition
Google's spam policies define doorway abuse as sites or pages created to rank for specific, similar search queries, which lead users to intermediate pages that aren't as useful as the final destination.
The page lists four examples. Multiple sites with slight variations in the address. Pages targeted at regions or cities that funnel users to one page. Pages generated to funnel visitors into the usable part of a site. And substantially similar pages that look more like search results than a browseable hierarchy.
A test for a family of pages
Take any two pages in the family and swap their place names. If both still read as true, they're doorways. A real city page says what that metro's economy runs on, which regulation bites there, what time zone the team overlaps with, and which published case a buyer there would recognise.
Heddle makes those fields required for its locations family, so a row without them is skipped. Then it measures the built pages against each other and fails any page past the family's ceiling.
Linking matters too
Funnelling is about where the page sends people, and linking is how a crawler sees it. A family where every page links the same nine siblings, and nothing else links in, looks like a closed set of entry points. On techfabric.com thirteen of twenty-five pages built that way were never fetched. Heddle rotates sibling links and requires every page to be reachable from the homepage.
Sources
Each was read on October 10, 2026.
Questions
Are location pages doorway pages?
Not by definition. Google's example is pages targeted at cities that funnel users to one page. A city page with its own facts, a reason to exist for a buyer there and an honest statement of where the company is based isn't a doorway.
How do I check my own pages for doorway risk?
Swap the place or product names between two pages in the family. If both still read as true, the pages are too alike. Heddle measures the same thing on the built HTML and fails a page whose sentences repeat past the family's ceiling.
Work with us
Let the agents bring you the leads.
Tell us about your business and who buys from you. On a short call we'll show you the searches your buyers make where you don't show up yet, and what the agents would do about them in their first month.
On the call, for your site
- The searches your buyers makeMeasured, with how many people make each one
- Where you show up, and where you don'tOn Google and in ChatGPT's answers
- The agents' first monthThe pages, fixes and links they would start with