Because creating doorway pages used to be so easy, especially when using programs that can automatically generate hundreds or thousands of pages in a heartbeat by using a simple template and merely placing the keywords in the right places, many sites lost control and created enormous amounts of them.

The search engines initially tolerated this behavior, but as their databases started being filled with doorway pages they soon realized that these pages would quickly conquer the top ranking spots from normal content-rich pages. This would reduce the quality of their indices and lower the value of the search results, resulting in users abandoning the search engine.

So, what did they do about it? Took action, of course. Altavista for example begun removing doorway pages from its index and in some cases even banning the sites that were using them. Other engines followed suit and soon it was safe to say that the age of doorway pages, at least in the form we used to know them, had passed.

We would recommend that you focus on optimizing your actual content pages instead of creating doorway pages. While that may be somewhat more difficult as you'll have to attempt to please both the search engine algorithms and the human visitors with the same page, it is certainly a less risky approach. If you at some point start feeling that you don't have enough pages and can't target all of the keywords you'd like to because of that reason, just create more content for your site.

While doorway pages can only be used to attract traffic from the search engines, a well-optimized page that has good content can get visitors from the search engines AND make people spread the word about your site.

Content pages also have one other advantage over doorway pages - it is easier to get people to link to them. Link popularity plays an important part in many of the algorithms of today's search engines, decreasing the value of old-fashioned doorway pages even more.