Meet a removals company in Birmingham that read a blog post about local landing pages and went feral. Eighty near-identical pages, one per suburb, the same 300 words with the town name swapped. Traffic didn't rise. It fell.
Google saw exactly what it was: doorway pages, thin content multiplied, zero unique value. The whole domain got dragged down by the dead weight.
We deleted 71 of them. We kept the nine suburbs where they did real volume and rebuilt each into something only a local could write: the tricky one-way streets, the buildings with no lift, the council permit quirks, real job photos from that area.
Deleting pages felt like going backwards. For three weeks the chart agreed.
Then the thin-content drag lifted, and the nine genuine pages started ranking properly for the first time.
Quotes from those suburbs rose 52 percent. Nine real pages beat eighty fake ones, decisively.
The lesson: a location page isn't a template with a town name in it. It's proof you've actually worked there.
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The mover who built 80 location pages and got punished
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