Doorway pages: when location pages become a problem

2 min read · Updated

The short answer

Doorway pages are pages made to rank for a search rather than to help the reader. The classic case is fifty near-identical pages that only swap the town name. Google's spam policies name them directly. Location pages are fine when each one carries something real and specific to that place.

What Google means

Google's spam policies describe doorway abuse as pages or sites made to rank for specific searches that funnel people somewhere else, with multiple city or region pages as a named example. Pages that are nearly the same apart from a place name fit that description.

What a real location page has

  • Work you've done in that area, with photos.
  • How you serve it: travel time, same-day availability.
  • Local specifics: permits, the age of the housing, problems common there.
  • Reviews from customers who live there.

If you already have dozens

  1. Keep the handful you can make genuinely useful.
  2. Merge the thin ones into a single "areas we serve" page.
  3. Redirect each old URL to the page that replaced it.

Questions

How many location pages is too many?

There's no number. One real page beats twenty copies.

Can doorway pages hurt my whole site?

Google can demote the pages, and in bad cases the site.

Can I use AI to write city pages?

Only if each page carries real, place-specific information that you supplied.

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