How many of you think the best and/or only way to get top placements on the search engines is to create gateway pages (aka doorway pages or bridge pages)? If you raised your hand, you are certainly not alone, but you are also mistaken! If you check out most search engine positioning companies' Web sites, you will find that most of them promise to get you high rankings by creating gateway pages for your site. These are pages that the positioning companies create independently of your current pages, which they load with keyword phrases then submit to the search engines.

Many of these companies use automated programs such as WebPosition Gold (WPG), which features a template that the company fills in with the "proper" amount of keywords and other text. The program's Page Generator function then generates a page that supposedly will rank high for a particular engine. These positioning companies will even go to the trouble to create different gateway pages for each search engine, using the WPG Page Critic function. This tool tells Webmasters what keyword density each engine supposedly wants to see (based on past results), and how many times you should put particular keyword phrases into the text and meta tags of the gateway pages.