What are doorway pages?
Doorway pages are pages built to catch search traffic for a set of similar queries, not to be useful themselves. They send visitors on to the page that actually matters, or they are near-copies of each other with a word swapped. Google's spam policies call this doorway abuse and treat it as spam.
The classic example is a service business with 60 pages titled "Plumber in [Town]", each the same text with a different town name, all pushing visitors to one contact form. The pages exist for search engines, not for people in those towns.
What Google's policy lists
Google's spam policies give four examples of doorway abuse:
- Several websites with slight variations in the URL and home page, to maximize reach for a query.
- Multiple domains or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page.
- Pages generated to funnel visitors into the actually useful part of a site.
- Substantially similar pages that are closer to search results than to a clearly defined, browsable hierarchy.
The common thread: the pages add a step for the visitor without adding anything the visitor needs.
Location pages done right
Location pages aren't doorways by default. A business with real branches, or one that genuinely serves distinct areas, can have a page for each. The difference is content that is specific to the place:
- A real address or service-area details, local phone number and opening hours.
- Staff, projects, photos or reviews from that location.
- Directions, parking, local pricing or regulations that actually differ.
If you can swap the town name and nothing else changes, it's a doorway. Merge those pages into one strong service-area page and see local SEO for alternatives.
Templates, builders and programmatic pages
Page builders and WordPress templates make it easy to clone a page fifty times, and that's where doorways usually start. Programmatic pages are fine when each one carries unique data or answers a distinct question. When they differ only in the keyword, they overlap with scaled content abuse and thin content. Violations can be caught by automated spam systems during a spam update or by a human reviewer as a manual action.
Common questions
Are city or location pages always doorway pages?
No. Pages with real, location-specific information that helps people in that area are legitimate. Pages that only swap the place name are doorways.
What happens if Google finds doorway pages?
They violate Google's spam policies, so the pages or site can rank lower or be removed from results, by automated systems or through a manual action.
How do I fix existing doorway pages?
Merge them into fewer, genuinely useful pages, redirect the old URLs to the best match, and add real local detail where a separate page is justified.