Doorway pages and the line Google actually draws

Google’s spam policies name doorway pages directly: pages created to rank for specific searches that funnel people to the same destination without offering distinct value. Most location-page estates fail that test. Here is how not to.

What the policy says, in plain words

Google’s spam documentation describes doorway abuse as creating many pages aimed at slight variations of a search, where each page adds nothing distinct. Its 2024 scaled-content policy tightened the same idea: producing pages at scale, with automation or without, is abuse when the pages exist for search engines first and people second.

Note what the policy does not say. It does not say location pages are spam. It does not set a number of pages that is too many. The line is drawn through value, not volume.

The substitution test

Take any two of your location pages and swap their place names. If each still reads as true, the pages are substitutable, and substitutable is exactly what a doorway page is. A human reviewer sees it in seconds. The algorithms are trained on the same signature: identical structure, identical phrasing, a different town in the H1.

Signals that mark an estate as doorways

• Every page shares the same text with the place name swapped.
• No page contains anything that required knowing the place: no jobs, no travel times, no local constraints.
• Pages exist for areas the business does not meaningfully serve.
• Hundreds of pages appeared on the same day, none linked from anywhere except a sitemap.

Fixing an estate you already have

First, measure the problem instead of guessing. Compare each page against its most similar sibling, not against the average; the worst pair is what a reviewer would screenshot. Then improve or remove: pages for areas you genuinely serve get real local substance written into them. Pages for areas you cannot defend get consolidated into a parent page or deleted. While you work, keeping weak pages out of the index is honest damage control.

Where Townsmith fits

Townsmith was built around this exact line. Its quality score gives 45 of 100 points to how distinct a page is from its closest sibling, measured on visible text with the swapped tokens stripped first, so changing “Rye” to “Lewes” earns nothing. The publish gate holds pages back until they clear your threshold, and a Pro rule drops below-threshold pages from the sitemap with noindex until they recover. The plugin exists to make the defensible version of local pages the easy version.