Another well-known company makes the news with the use of doorway pages on their German site. Philip has the scoop on the techniques used and when the site got banned.
This story spread like wildfire and has been covered in Forbes, London Times, Sydney Morning Herald, Financial Times, BBC News and probably many more. With all this free publicity, it certainly paid off for them.
I really doubt a smaller business would have generated such media attention and would have gotten re-included in the index within days for pulling such stunts.
So the moral? Unless you’re a big well-known business, don’t try this trick on your sites… and if you do, don’t get caught.