20 August 2026 · 7 min read
It is still one of the most commonly sold local SEO tactics in India, it works briefly, and it is a named spam pattern in Google’s own documentation.
Short answer
A doorway page is a page created primarily for search engines rather than users, typically the same content repeated with a city name swapped. Google’s spam policies name this pattern explicitly. A real location page differs by having a genuine presence, area-specific content and its own contact route.
01 The premise
The tactic is attractive because it produces a visible result quickly. Publish forty pages targeting forty city-plus-service combinations, and for a while some of them rank for low-competition terms. A monthly report showing forty new ranking keywords looks like progress, and the agency has done a few hours of work.
The problem arrives later, and it arrives as a step rather than a slope. Sites carrying large numbers of near-identical pages get caught by spam systems or by manual review, and the recovery involves removing the pages and waiting — frequently for longer than the traffic was ever worth.
The uncomfortable part for a business is that by the time it happens, the agency that built them has usually moved on, and the cost of cleanup lands on whoever is there next. I have inherited several of these, and the conversation is always the same: remove them, redirect what has genuine value, and rebuild properly.
02 Straight talk
The distinction is not subtle once it is written down.
03 The alternative
Slower, and it does not get removed six months later.
— Questions
No — a real page for a real location is legitimate and useful. The problem is templated pages for places you have no presence in, differing only by a swapped city name. The test is whether a resident would find anything specific to their area on it.
As many as you have genuine locations or genuinely distinct service areas with specific content. There is no numerical limit; there is a content limit. Forty pages that each say something real is fine, and almost nobody has forty real things to say.
Assess them individually. Pages with genuine content and traffic can be improved. Pages that are pure templates should be removed and redirected to the relevant service page. Doing this before an algorithmic action is considerably cheaper than after.
Through a complete Google Business Profile, genuine content about work done in those areas, honest service-area statements, and paid advertising where organic proximity is not achievable. Advertising is legitimate where a fabricated location is not.
— More
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The reasoning on this page is public because I would rather be judged on it than on a claim. If you want it applied, that is the service.
Name, number, email, what you need.