Service area pages: what Google allows and what it calls spam

Service area pages are allowed. Google has no rule against a page about a town you work in. What its spam policy names is a set of pages “targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page”. The difference is whether each page says something true about that town that would be false about the next one.

What Google’s policy actually says

Two parts of Google’s spam policies apply to city pages. The first is doorway abuse:

“Doorway abuse is when sites or pages are created to rank for specific, similar search queries. They lead users to intermediate pages that aren’t as useful as the final destination.”— Google Search Central, spam policies for Google web search

Google lists four examples. Two describe the classic city-page setup:

• “Having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page”
• “Creating substantially similar pages that are closer to search results than a clearly defined, browseable hierarchy”

The second part is scaled content abuse, “when many pages are generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users.” Its first listed example is “using generative AI tools or other similar tools to generate many pages without adding value”.

Read those again and look for what is missing. There is no number of pages. There is no percentage of text that must differ. You will see agencies quote 40 or 60 percent. That figure is not in the policy. The policy is about purpose and usefulness.

The consequence is stated plainly too: “Sites that violate our policies may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all.” Google says it finds violations through automated systems and, as needed, human review that can end in a manual action. Note that the sentence says sites, not pages.

The swap test for every page

In December 2019 someone asked Google’s John Mueller about building 1,300 city landing pages on a keyword-plus-city plan. His answer was one line: “That sounds like doorway pages, not something I’d recommend.”

You are unlikely to be planning 1,300. The same problem exists at fifteen. Here is the test to run on each page you have or plan:

1. Copy the page into a document.
2. Replace the town name everywhere with a different town you serve.
3. Read it as a customer in the second town would.

If every sentence is still true, the page has no local content. It is the same page with a different label, which is what “substantially similar pages” means. If sentences turn false, because the permit office is wrong, the travel time is wrong, the photo is of a street that is not there, you have a real page.

Google’s own self-assessment questions for content point the same way. Two of them: “Does the content provide original information, reporting, research, or analysis?” and “Is the content primarily made to attract visits from search engines?”

What a city page can and cannot do

Before writing one, be clear about what it is for. The usual hope is to appear in the map results in the next town over. A page will not do that.

Google says local results rest on relevance, distance and prominence, and defines the second one this way: “Distance refers to how far each business is from the customer who’s searching.” Your distance from a searcher is set by where your business is. It also says, “There’s no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google.”

This is why your ranking changes depending on where the searcher stands. The map and the web results are two systems. City pages work on the second.

Which towns deserve a page

Start from your records, not from a map. Pull the last year of invoices and count jobs by town. Then ask, for each town near the top of that list, whether you can write down at least four of these without looking anything up that a competitor could also look up in a minute:

• Jobs you did there, described specifically: the street type, the problem, what you found.
• The building or permit office that covers it, and what that office asks for on your kind of job.
• How long it takes you to get there, and whether you charge a trip fee.
• The housing or building stock you see there, and what it means for the work.
• The local conditions that change the job: water, soil, salt air, an HOA with rules, a historic district.
• Photos you took there.
• A review from a customer in that town, quoted with their permission.

Towns where you can answer four or more get a page. Towns where you cannot get a line on a single “Areas we serve” page, with no page of their own. For most small service businesses that sorts into three to eight real pages and one list.

One page, before and after

The example below is invented to show the pattern. The town and the details are placeholders, not facts about a real place.

The template version is not dangerous because it is short. It is a doorway page because nothing on it is about Riverton.

Where the pages sit in your site

Google’s fourth doorway example contrasts similar pages with “a clearly defined, browseable hierarchy”. Build the hierarchy:

• One Areas we serve page, linked from the main menu or footer, listing every town you cover.
• Each town with its own page is linked from that list. Towns without one are plain text.
• Each city page links to the service pages for the work you described on it, and to your contact page. It does not funnel everyone to a single form with nothing else to read.
• Do not build a page for every service in every city. Eight services across ten towns is eighty pages, and no small business has eighty pages of true, different things to say. If you are unsure which services need their own page in the first place, sort that out first.

What to do with the city pages you already have

If a past web company left you with thirty near-identical pages, work through them in this order:

1. Run the swap test on each. Mark each page as real, fixable or empty.
2. Real: leave it. Add a photo or a recent job when you have one.
3. Fixable: a town you do work in, with a template page. Rewrite it from the facts list above.
4. Empty: a town you rarely or never work in. Remove the page and redirect its address to your Areas we serve page, so nobody lands on an error.
5. Check Search Console a month later for the pages you kept. Look at impressions and clicks for searches that include the town name.

Fewer pages is a safe direction. The policy’s consequence falls on sites, so thin pages are a cost to the good ones sitting beside them.

Pick the town at the top of your invoice count and write that one page this week. If it will not pass the swap test, you have learned which page not to build, and that is worth knowing too.