Thin content
Pages with little or no substantive value of their own — scraped, auto-generated, doorway-like, or near-empty templated pages.
ContentGateway pagesBridge pages
Doorway pages
Pages or sites created to rank for many similar queries and funnel users to a single destination, providing no unique value themselves.
In full
Google's spam policies name doorways explicitly: multiple domains or pages targeting slight query variations, near-duplicate city or region pages, and pages that funnel users to an intermediate page rather than the content they wanted. The test is whether each page is genuinely useful in its own right to the person who lands on it. Templated local landing pages cross into doorway territory when only the place name changes.
Example
Four hundred pages reading 'emergency plumber in [town]' with identical copy and a shared phone number.
Related terms
Local landing pages
Pages on a business's own site dedicated to a specific location or service area, supporting both localised organic rankings and the…
Scaled content abuse
Generating many pages primarily to manipulate rankings rather than help users, whether by AI, templates, scraping, or stitching content…
Google spam policies
Google's documented list of behaviours that can cause lower rankings or removal, covering cloaking, doorways, hacked content, keyword…
Programmatic SEO
Generating large numbers of pages from structured data against templated query patterns, such as 'flights from X to Y' or '[job] salary in…