Doorway pages are pages created to rank for a set of closely related searches, usually by swapping a place name or keyword, while offering visitors little or nothing unique and often funnelling them to the same destination. Google lists doorway abuse as a breach of its spam policies.
How doorway pages work
The classic London pattern looks like this. A cleaning company publishes “Office cleaning in Camden”, “Office cleaning in Islington”, “Office cleaning in Hackney” and so on through all 32 boroughs. Each page carries the same text with the borough name changed, the same photos and the same contact form. None says anything specific about the area, and the business may not even work in half of them. The aim is simply to have a page ready for every borough-level search.
Other forms include many pages targeting slight keyword variations, such as “emergency plumber”, “24 hour plumber” and “urgent plumber”, with near-identical copy, and pages that exist only to pass visitors on to another page or site. Large sets are often produced from templates or with AI, which overlaps with Google’s policy on scaled content abuse.
Why it matters
Doorway pages rarely work for long, and they can drag down the whole site. Google’s systems are built to recognise sets of interchangeable pages: at best they are filtered out as duplicates, at worst they contribute to a manual action or a sitewide quality problem. They also split your effort, because thirty weak pages compete with each other and with your main service page, a form of keyword cannibalisation.
The distinction matters because genuine location landing pages are legitimate and useful. The difference is substance. A page for a branch in Kingston with its own address, opening hours, parking details, reviews from that branch and photos of the premises is a real page about a real place. A page for “plumber in Kingston” from a business that just swapped in the word is a doorway.
Common mistakes
- Find-and-replace location pages. Changing only the town or borough name is the defining doorway pattern.
- Pages for areas you do not genuinely serve. Targeting every borough to look bigger than you are misleads visitors as well as search engines.
- Hiding the pages. Doorway sets are often missing from the main navigation and reachable only through a footer list of place names, a sign they exist for search engines rather than people.
- Assuming AI rewording fixes it. Paraphrasing the same text thirty ways still produces pages with nothing distinct to say.
How to act on it
Test each location page with one question: if the place name were removed, could a reader tell which area the page is about? If not, it is probably a doorway. List what you can honestly say for each area: a branch or base there, specific jobs you can describe with the client’s permission, local building stock or regulations that change the work, travel times, local reviews. Areas with real, distinct content earn their own page; the rest are usually better covered together on one page that lists where you work.
When consolidating, 301-redirect retired pages to the most relevant remaining page and update internal links. For a service-area business, make sure your Google Business Profile service areas match reality too. Deciding which places deserve a page, and writing those pages properly, is a central part of my local SEO work in London and across the UK.