500 location pages, all the same paragraph

500 location pages, all the same paragraph
Local service site spun up a page per city. /plumber-austin, /plumber-dallas — identical copy, city name swapped. Google indexed 20, ignored 480 as doorway pages.

What I did:
— consolidated dead-weight cities into regional hub pages
— kept individual pages ONLY where there was real local content (address, reviews, photos, local pricing)
— interlinked survivors by region

Programmatic location pages die when the only variable is a token swap. Each page needs something genuinely local or it's a doorway.

Caveat: don't mass-noindex them either — fold the weak ones into hubs with 301s so the URLs keep value.