Are doorway pages black hat or white hat?

[max.favilli]

I am asking because I keep creating spam reports on google web master tools when I find them on competitors websites but nothing happen...

Anyone else had better experience with spam reports?

[LesleyPaone]

Do they add value to the site? Are they adwords pages? I have noticed a lot of companies are getting around the doorway pages seemingly by having them displayed for adwords ads. Like say having a doorway page for a city, and it is targeted to the add <city keyword="">so when you open it up it is basically a doorway page. I think it is a sketchy area, I would love to hear what others have to say about it. </city>

[gazzerman1]

Google's John Mueller said many times that reporting a site does not mean you will see immediate action. The penguin algo has not updated for over 1 year!!! So immediate action implies 1 year or more sometimes!

What they do is gather lots of data and use it to factor in to a new algorithm update. This can take a very long time and as I have argued many many times, is a very infective approach as by the time they are rolled out the guilty sites have a new tactic in place already.

Doorway pages are frowned upon and will eventually get hit by some algo.