Pages designed specifically to improve a website's search engine placement. These pages are also known as bridge pages or doorway pages and are used for a variety of reasons, such as to emphasise particular keywords or phrases; to target the optimization requirements of a specific search engine; or to overcome the elements of a website that are not 'search engine friendly', such as frames or software applications like Flash. However, gateway pages can also take many different forms and care must be taken when using these to achieve a good search engine placement as they can be viewed as spamming if prepared incorrectly.

As a rule, Google does not appreciate any kind of dishonest means of achieving Search Engine Rankings. "Spam," as far as Google is concerned, is anything geared to achieve high rankings for your pages in an unnatural way.

In fact, Google specifically mentions Gateway Pages when advising webmasters about what not to do to make your site Google-friendly. The specific mention of this technique definitely suggests that once Google identifies these gateway pages it will punish the site to an unspecified degree. This might mean you don't get the rankings you want for that specific page, or it might mean your entire domain suffers. At this point it is difficult to say, and it is also difficult to estimate how Google would separate the spammers' gateway pages from the legitimate pages.