Client had 300 city pages. 290 were thin garbage dragging the rest down.

Client had 300 city pages. 290 were thin garbage dragging the rest down.
Local-service site spun up a page per city: same template, swap the city name, nothing else. Classic doorway-page pattern. Google was one update away from nuking all of them.
The move:
— Cut to the 40 cities with real business activity and real search demand.
— Made those 40 genuinely unique: local case studies, real addresses, area-specific pricing, photos.
— Noindexed and de-linked the other 260. Redirected the few with backlinks to the nearest strong city page.
— Removed the dead ones from the sitemap.
The surviving 40 jumped because the whole domain stopped looking spammy.
Watch the rollback urge from the client who "wants coverage everywhere." Coverage of empty pages is negative coverage. Fewer real pages beats hundreds of templated ghosts.