Doorway pages hurt our own site. Here’s how we do local SEO now.
Doorway pages are many near-identical pages built to rank for slightly different searches, like the same service page cloned for dozens of cities, that funnel visitors to one place. Google’s spam policies name them specifically, and they can drag down a whole site. Build pages for the services and areas you genuinely serve, with content only you could write.
On our own roadside site we tried most of what the SEO industry sells: rewrites, link packages and lots of location pages. Some of it helped. The location pages for places we had little real presence in didn’t. They were thin, they were almost identical, and recovering from them took a long time. This is what we do instead.
What a doorway page looks like
- The same service page copied for 30 nearby towns with only the city name changed.
- Pages for cities where the business has no office, no staff and rarely works.
- Pages that exist only to rank, with little to read and every link pointing to one contact page.
Google’s spam policies describe doorway pages and say sites using them can rank lower or be removed from results. Even when they don’t trigger a penalty, a site full of thin pages tends to look less trustworthy overall.
Why agencies still sell them
They’re easy to produce, they make a report look busy (“we published 50 pages this month”), and sometimes they work for a while. The cost shows up later, and it lands on the owner.
What we build instead
- One strong page per service. Written from real jobs: what it costs, how long it takes, what to expect.
- One honest location page per real location. For us that’s Austin and San Marcos, and it matches our Google Business Profile.
- Service areas stated plainly. A list of the areas you cover on the service pages and the profile, not a page per suburb.
- Local proof. Real photos, real job stories and reviews from real customers.
- A complete, active Google Business Profile. Accurate categories, regular posts and replies to reviews.
When a city page is fine
If you have a real office, staff or a meaningful amount of work in a city, and you can write something specific about serving it, a page can earn its place. The test: would the page still be useful if search engines didn’t exist?
Already have doorway pages?
Don’t delete them all in a panic. Find which ones get real traffic or leads, merge or improve those, and redirect or remove the rest carefully. We do this audit as part of our web design work.