:DI have heard that manually created entry pages work well in the search engines. Had anyone tried this?

Are we talking about doorway pages or landing pages? Each are similar in many respects, but are ethically different and have different purposes.

A doorway page is where you spam the index of search engines to catch visitors using a page of no real value which then redirects the user to a different page. It's ethically wrong, and will result in being penalised by search engines.

Landing pages, on the other hand, are perfectly acceptable. These are pages of real value to both human visitors and search engines. They are pages of content specifically designed for users searching for a particular phrase. Rather than having a visit enter your site on the homepage which is full of content about multiple topics, a landing page will focus on one particular topic which, if the landing page is working well, will be the topic the user was searching for.

The idea of a landing page is to give the best quality content to the user, as fast as possible. And hopefully secure a loyal visitor who will navigate further in to your site.

In short, if we're really talking doorway pages, then stay away. If we're talking landing pages, then go right for it, measure the results, and change the pages accordingly to improve the results. :)

Google folk is very skilled in detecting doorway page. One of the proof is that they change IP of their bot often and you can't use referred from code to detect bot anymore.

The short answer: Yes they still work.

Expounding answer: But they will get caught sooner or later by a manual review, and that may get your entire site penalized. Not something I would suggest using.

Google folk is very skilled in detecting doorway page. One of the proof is that they change IP of their bot often and you can't use referred from code to detect bot anymore.

You are not talking about doorway pages or redirection, you are talking about cloaking. Let's stay on topic. :)

Cloaking and doorway pages are similar but they work in different ways. you can find informations here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doorway_page) and please stop arguing with me because it make no good for reader.

We will be using landing pages for our website which will include various topics that the surfer might be searching for. Landing pages have proven to be quite effective for SEO reasons, this is from experiences and experiences shared with me by other webmasters that learned to take advantage of SEO.

please stop arguing with me because it make no good for reader.

No problem, start staying on topic and not confusing readers by posting about cloaking when the OP was asking about doorway pages. :)

You might want to read this before attempting anything sneaky.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66355

I agree, Google folk is very skilled in detecting doorway page. But doorway can keep in top long enough and at a good investment will bring the good income.

In the end, the page you are creating needs to be of high quality where someone looking for information would benefit.

As long as the page benefits the user viewing and trully has good content to the subject matter it should be no problem. Sites that just make up tons of doorway pages that have nothing really good to say are what the search engines don't want. But there are billions and billions of pages and I am sure the search engines do catch the bad ones from time to time. I try to give every page I make something that a user can use. Plus the doorway pages really hurt everyone as it then makes it harder for real good stuff to get to the top. If everyone was fare we would all have a better chance at making money from the searches.
P.S. Hope this is on subject!

Doorway pages are never good no matter what the content but landing pages are fine.

Smart doorway pages ----> If you have a very long article, then you split it into several pages of 400 - 500 word articles targetting different set of keywords. Each page can target around 3 keywords.

At the end of each page, you can put a link to the continuation of the article with appropriate keywords in this link.