Location pages that are not doorway pages

Plenty of multi-location sites have more location pages than locations. A plumbing firm in one town has a page for each of twenty towns around it. A car hire brand has a page for every city in the country, with branches in a dozen. The pages share one template, one block of copy and one phone number, and the only thing that changes is the place name. Google's spam policies have a name for that pattern, and most of the fix is deciding which pages should exist at all.

Location pages sit inside a wider local search programme of profiles, reviews and measurement, which is covered in the local SEO guide.

Google's spam policies define doorway abuse as sites or pages created to rank for specific, similar search queries, which lead users to intermediate pages that are not as useful as the final destination. One of the four examples is having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page.¹ That is the city page template, described almost word for word.

Bing reaches the same place by a different route. Its guidelines list publishing the same or substantially similar content across multiple URLs, and large-scale content generated without editorial review, among the practices that reduce ranking eligibility or lead to exclusion from the index.² Neither search engine objects to location pages as such. Both object to pages that exist only because a place name was swapped into a template.

The policy does not forbid templates, or pages about places. The test is whether each page is useful in its own right or exists to catch a search and pass the visitor on. When Google updated its doorway guidance in 2015, it published a set of questions for telling the two apart.³ They still work as an audit checklist.

A useful location page answers the questions a customer has about that branch before they ring or turn up. Those answers differ by location. There is some outside evidence that substance helps on the map side too: Sterling Sky's 2025 study of 8,186 map pack listings across 200 US cities found a slight correlation between the number of substantive words on the page a listing links to and how well it ranked.⁴ I would expect these on every page:

• The address, a map, and how to get there: parking, the nearest station or bus stop, step-free access, the entrance to use.
• Opening hours for that site, including the days that differ from the rest of the group and any bank holiday changes.
• The people. Named staff where the sector expects it (dentists, solicitors, branch managers), and what each one does.
• The services that site offers, and the ones it does not. A group rarely offers everything everywhere.
• Reviews from customers of that branch, and photos of that building and team.
• Something only a local branch can say: jobs completed nearby, stock held at that depot, the local hospital it refers to, the parking rules at the airport.

The same specificity matters beyond Google's organic results. Assistants answering local questions usually retrieve pages and compose an answer from what they find, so a page full of facts about one branch gives them something to quote. I have set out a working model of that in how an assistant decides which businesses to name.

Define each local business location as a LocalBusiness type, using the most specific subtype possible.⁵ Schema.org has plenty to choose from. Dentist sits directly under LocalBusiness, while AutomotiveBusiness, HomeAndConstructionBusiness and Store are parent types that hold more specific ones, such as AutoRental, Plumber and WholesaleStore.⁶

Structured data should not mark up content that is not visible to readers of the page.⁷ Bing applies the same rule: markup must accurately reflect visible content, and misleading markup may be ignored.² So the markup should repeat what the page already says. Hours in the JSON-LD that appear nowhere on the page, or a phone number that differs from the one printed above it, are the kind of mismatch to remove.

The link to the Business Profile

There is no documented technical connection between LocalBusiness markup and a Business Profile. The connection is consistency, and it runs through three places. The profile's website should represent the individual business location,⁸ so each profile's website link should go to its own location page and not the homepage. Bing Places asks the same of multi-location businesses: a location-specific website where one exists, and consistent names across all locations.⁹ The page then states the same name, address, phone number and hours as the profile, and the markup repeats them. Schema.org offers a hasMap property for a URL to a map of the place,⁶ and some sites put the profile's Maps link there. That is reasonable, but I have not seen Google say it reads it, so I would not expect it to do much on its own.

Treat the location data as one record with three outputs. Hold the name, address, phone, hours and services for each branch in one place, and generate the page, the markup and the profile updates from it. Mismatches tend to appear when someone edits a page by hand after the profile changed, or the other way round.

The hardest part of location pages is deciding not to build some. A page needs something true about that place to say. If the honest content for a town is the business's standard copy with the town name in it, the page is a doorway however it was produced.

Service area businesses are where this goes wrong most often. A service area business should have one profile for its central office or location, with a designated service area.⁸ It can list up to 20 areas, and the overall area should not extend beyond about two hours of driving time from where the business is based.¹⁰ A plumber covering fourteen towns from one base has one location, and Sterling Sky's long-running tracking of its own profile suggests it is ranked from that base, with the service area affecting only what is displayed.¹¹ One good page about the area covered, with the towns listed and a few real jobs from around the patch, serves those customers better than fourteen copies. The service area post covers the profile side of this.

The exception is a town where the plumber has done enough work to show it, with photos of jobs and reviews from customers there. The test is whether you could write the page without the template. If you cannot, do not publish it.

Practitioner opinion points the same way. Whitespark's 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors survey of 47 local search specialists put a dedicated page for each service first among local organic factors, with the city or neighbourhood relevance of the content second.¹² Read together, that favours pages with something real to say about a service in a place, which a swapped template does not have. It is a survey of opinion, so treat it as a guide and not as proof.

Building pages from a database is fine when the data supports each page. The Programmatic skill in my open-source pack applies this test before it generates anything, and refuses to make pages that differ only by a swapped location.

Hundreds of location pages cannot be judged by reading them one at a time. These steps measure how much of each page is unique and check what Google has done with the set. The commands are rough, but they produce a sorted list quickly.

Then give each page one action. This is the same kind of decision as choosing which faceted navigation pages to index: a page gets its place in the index by being useful on its own.

Merging is a small migration, so treat it like one. Map every old URL to its new home, check the redirects resolve in one hop, and remove the old URLs from the sitemap. How to build a redirect map covers the mechanics.

A fictional car hire brand has 14 branches: three airport desks and eleven town branches. Its site has 120 location pages. The 14 branch pages are built from the branch system and carry the address and hours. The other 106 are "car hire in [town]" pages created a few years ago, each a 300-word block with the town name inserted, and each pointing to the booking form for the nearest branch.

The site ends up with 14 location pages, each one useful to the person who lands on it. The same method suits the dental group and the electrical distributor, with the depot's stock and collection hours doing the work that the airport details do here. For a group, report each branch separately afterwards, because group averages hide the branches that are failing.