Having portal page that takes you to website with a different url

[Manifestation]

We are in the planning stages for this.

Our client wants his (as yet) domain name to be a portal page for this new campaign.

His domain name is a non-keyword company name (i.e. widgetsgalore.com)

We already have a website with content tailored to his business ready to go. In fact, we did a campaign back in '06 to '09 that was highly successful. At that time it was just the webpage with a keyword rich url.

Now for some reason the client wants his company name url (widgetsgalore.com) to be the portal page (landing page) that once potential clients click on it takes them to the website with the content.

What are the pros and cons of doing what client asks about making his widgetsgalore.com a portal page vs. going directly to the url with all the content/forms, etc?

This is a local site, with audience limited to southern california.

[SamuelScott]

Short version: Do not do this!

Long version: What the client is asking is for you to create a "doorway page." This was a very popular black-hat SEO tactic years ago. Here's some background and additional links from Wikipedia.

Such a tactic is very bad for many reasons. Here are just a few:

1. It is bad for the user experience. If I click on a search-results page to go to a website and am interrupted by a doorway page, that makes me angry. It's an unnecessary step that makes it take longer to get to where I want to go.

2. It's bad for SEO. Doorway pages are typically associated with keyword spam. As such, Google really, really, hates doorway pages. Here's an old but relevant post by Matt Cutts (Google's head of web spam). I can all but guarantee you that his site will be whacked by Google if he uses doorway pages.

Your client is likely relying on very old (and very bad!) SEO advice. He should be reminded that SEO is not a "bag of tricks" to get a site to rank first in Google very quickly. It is a collection of technical and other best practices that help to improve the experiences of both humans and search engines on a website.

Sorry I didn't see this question sooner -- I hope it worked out!

[Manifestation]

Appreciate your feedback.

This clarifies the issues for us.

The timing worked out perfectly ... so yes, your response worked for us.

No doorway page. Thanks for adding the link to Matt Cutts article.