<b>200 location pages, all the same text = doorway penalty risk</b>

<b>200 location pages, all the same text = doorway penalty risk</b>

Client had /plumber-austin/, /plumber-dallas/, /plumber-houston/ — 200 of them, identical except the city name swapped in. Classic doorway pattern Google explicitly targets.

The rescue:
— Killed the 150 cities where they had no real presence (these were pure spam pages)
— For the 50 real service areas: added genuinely unique content — local projects, real addresses, area-specific FAQs, embedded map
— Linked them from a proper /service-areas/ hub, not a footer dump

Scaled-down but real. The survivors started ranking because they stopped looking templated.

Caveat: programmatic location pages aren't banned — thin templated ones are. The line is whether each page would exist if a human had to justify it.