Never Create Doorway Pages for Directories Like Yahoo!

STOP! Don't do it. Do not attempt to submit additional pages to submission-populated directories - they will be rejected, and your main page may be penalized. Your rank in these directories will be determined more by how you word your submission describing your site than by the words that make up your main page. However, Yahoo!, in particular, will visit your site and ensure that your content is consistent with your submission.

Submitting All the Pages That Make Up Your Site

Once you've created your doorway pages, take the time to submit each one individually to the search engines. For the rest of your site, you can submit just one page that links to all the others, directly or indirectly. Search engines that spider Web sites should start with the page you submit, and index all the pages that make up your site.

"Should" is the important word in that last sentence. We've found that it sometimes takes quite a long time for a search engine's spider to return to complete the task of indexing the pages beyond the specific page you submit. Sometimes they never complete the indexing of the whole site.

Some search engines may favor pages which are spidered by the search engine over those which you submit directly. AltaVista in particular seems to be giving higher rankings to spidered pages. In order to take advantage of this, submit only one page with links to the rest of your site to AltaVista. The disadvantage of this strategy is that you may have to wait longer for your site to
be spidered. If you are involved in a competitive keyword area, the wait may well be worth it.

Search engine submission is becoming increasingly complicated. Be sure to read each search engine's submission guidelines carefully. Note that Infoseek indexes only the pages you specifically submit and rarely spiders to another page.

There are also a number of good submission services and products out there that you might use to save time. However, for the best results be sure that the doorway pages are submitted individually in some fashion.