How many location pages can you create before they’re seen as doorway pages?
- Published November 6, 2026
- Linked from 1 answer
- In a cluster of 9
Google sets no number: its spam policies define doorway pages by why they exist and how alike they are, not by how many there are: pages made to rank for similar searches, such as one per city, that give the visitor little of their own and lead to the same place. Five location pages that each describe a real branch, its staff, hours and the work done in that area are unlikely to be read as doorways. Fifty pages that share one text with the city name changed are at risk, and so would five of them be. A business that serves several towns from one office can still have useful area pages without inventing a branch in each: the real coverage, local conditions and work done there carry them.
What decides it, page by page
| Question | Location page | Doorway page |
|---|---|---|
| Does the business really serve this place? | Yes, from a branch or with a defined service area | No, or only in the sense that it would take a job there |
| What does the page contain that the others do not? | Address or coverage, local details, local examples, local contact | The place name |
| Where does the page send the visitor? | It answers the visitor's question on the page | It pushes them to a general page or a single contact form |
| Would a reader in that place learn something? | Yes | Nothing beyond what any other page says |
Google’s spam policies give, among the doorway examples, pages built for particular cities or regions whose job is to pass visitors on to a single page, and near-identical pages that work more like a list of search results than like a section a visitor can browse. Each of those describes a property of the pages, and none mentions a count.
Why large sets go wrong
Volume does not create the problem, but it makes it likely. Writing something specific for each of ten branches is work a business can do; writing something specific for three hundred towns it does not have a presence in is not, and the gap gets filled with template text. The limit on location pages is the number of places you can say something true and specific about.
Building a set that holds
- Start from where the business operates: branches, service areas, or projects you can describe.
- For each place, list what a visitor from there needs that a visitor from elsewhere does not.
- Create a page only where that list has real entries.
- For areas you serve without a local presence, consider one service page that names the area covered, an option weighed in when a single service page is better than separate city pages.
Count the places you can describe, not the places you would like to rank in.
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