Definition
A doorway page is a page that exists only to rank for a specific search query or a variant of it and then sends the visitor on to another, generic destination. Classic examples are series of pages such as 'plumber Utrecht', 'plumber Amersfoort' and 'plumber Zeist' that are identical apart from the place name and all lead to the same contact form.
Google names doorway pages explicitly in its spam policies and defines them as pages that act as an intermediate step: they offer no value of their own but capture search traffic for another page. Characteristics are: several pages targeting the same keyword variations, content that differs only in the variable, pages that are not part of the normal navigation, and pages that redirect the visitor almost immediately. The penalty is a manual action or algorithmic devaluation of the pages involved, sometimes of the whole site.
The line between doorway pages and legitimate programmatic SEO or local landing pages is about substance, not technique. A page per branch with the real address, opening hours, the local team, photos of the location, reviews from customers in that place and specific services is not a doorway page, even though the structure is the same for every branch. A page per town where you have no branch and which only drops the town name into a template is.
The practical test is whether a visitor who lands on the page is helped there or merely passed along. For every page in a series, ask: what is here that is nowhere else? If the answer is only 'the place name' or 'the keyword', the page is a doorway. If the answer is 'local data, local examples, local reviews', it is a landing page.
Since language models make it easy to generate unique text per variant, the risk has not disappeared but shifted: a page with unique sentences but no unique facts is still a doorway page in disguise, and Google's policy against scaled content abuse is aimed at exactly that. Traze only creates pages for entities about which it has real, distinguishing data and does not add place or keyword variants without original content.