An electrician in Bristol pays for twenty location pages, one per town within an hour's drive. Each is the same four paragraphs with the town name swapped. Months later none of them rank, and Search Console lists most of them as "Crawled, currently not indexed". A location page earns its place by saying things that are only true of that place. Anything less is the pattern Google's spam policies describe by name, and the pattern its index quietly drops.
Why swapped-name pages get filtered
Two things work against templated pages, and neither is a penalty.
The first is indexing. Before ranking anything, Google decides whether a page is distinct enough to keep, and it treats near-identical pages as versions of one page, keeping one or none (How Google ranks a page covers this). Twenty pages that differ by one word look like one page with twenty URLs, and "Crawled, currently not indexed" is Google saying so.
The second is policy. Google's spam policies list doorway abuse, with "multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page" as one example. The same document defines scaled content abuse as generating many pages to manipulate rankings rather than help users, and its first example is "using generative AI tools or other similar tools to generate many pages without adding value for users". Both describe the electrician's pages. Google says there's no duplicate content penalty as such; the usual outcome is that the pages never rank, though the policies page says violating sites may rank lower or not appear at all.
The line Google draws is value, not method. A page drafted by a template, a person or an AI tool is fine when it gives a reader in that town something they couldn't get from your homepage, and it's doorway content when it doesn't.
What can only be true of this place
The test for every sentence is whether it would become false if you changed the town name. Build the page from sentences that fail it.
Jobs you've done there. The rewire on a Victorian terrace off the high street, the consumer unit in a new-build on the edge of town, each with a photo and a date.
The housing and the buildings. A town of interwar semis has different wiring from a town of barn conversions. What you find in the lofts, the common faults. Nobody can write this without having been there, and a local reader knows it.
Practical detail. How long it takes you to get there, which days you're usually in that area, where you park, anything the council or the water company does differently. Small things, but true, and impossible to template.
Reviews from customers in that town. Quote them, name the area they mention, and link to the full review. If you don't have any yet, ask the next customer there; getting reviews consistently gives you the routine.
The services you actually do there, and any you don't. If you do emergency work in the city and only planned work further out, say so. Link each named service to its service page rather than rewriting it.
Then the ordinary on-page elements: a title such as "Electrician in Bath | Brook Electrical", a matching heading, a first paragraph that says what you do in this town, your phone number and the same business details as your profile. One page per town covering the services you do there, never a page per service per town.
Three checks before you publish
- The swap test. Change the town name throughout. If the page is still true, it isn't a location page; it's your homepage with a different heading.
- The local-reader test. Would someone who lives there learn anything about you they couldn't get elsewhere on your site. If not, Google has no reason to keep the page.
- The inventory test. Count how many towns you can write this page for honestly, with jobs, photos and reviews. That's how many location pages you should have. Smaller places that don't pass get grouped into one honest page, as the keyword mapping lesson described.
Link them, feed them, and retire them
A location page nobody links to gets crawled rarely. Put an "Areas we cover" section on your homepage linking to every location page by town name, and link from each service page to the towns where you offer it.
Location pages age well only if they're fed. Every job in that town is a sentence and possibly a photo; every review naming the area is a quote. Add them as they happen and the page grows more specific each month.
When you stop serving a place, take the page down or redirect it to the nearest page you still serve. A page for a town you no longer visit is simply false, and the customer who calls on the strength of it becomes the review you didn't want.
What to take away
- Google filters swapped-name location pages at indexing, and its spam policies name the pattern as doorway abuse and scaled content abuse.
- The line is value, not method: a location page is fine when it gives a reader in that town something they couldn't get from your homepage.
- Build each page from what is only true of that place: jobs and photos, the local housing, practical detail, reviews from that town, and the services you really do there.
- Run the swap test, the local-reader test and the inventory test before publishing, then feed the page with new jobs and reviews over time.
Next
If you travel to customers rather than serving them at an address, the setup changes. Service-area businesses covers the rules Google sets and how to rank across the whole area.