You might’ve heard this pitch: “We’ll build a page for every town in your state.” Five hundred pages by next week, each one the same paragraph with a different town name dropped in, a lot of the time written by AI off a single template.
Sounds like a lot for the money. Google sees it differently.
Google has a name for it
Google’s spam policies call it doorway abuse:
“Doorway abuse is when sites or pages are created to rank for specific, similar search queries. They lead users to intermediate pages that aren’t as useful as the final destination.”
One of the examples Google gives is almost word for word the pitch above: “pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page.”
Google’s got a second rule for pages made in bulk, scaled content abuse: “when many pages are generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users.” One of its examples is “using generative AI tools or other similar tools to generate many pages without adding value for users.”
What happens to a site that breaks the rules
Google doesn’t mince words: “Sites that violate our policies may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all.”
Sometimes a real person at Google reviews the site and hands down what it calls a manual action. Then “some or all of that site will not be shown in Google search results.” Doorways are on Google’s list of reasons for one.
So those five hundred pages might not just fail to help. They can drag down the site they’re sitting on.
AI isn’t the problem
None of this means a page written with help from AI breaks the rules. Google says so directly: “Appropriate use of AI or automation is not against our guidelines.”
The problem is pages that only exist to catch a search and don’t give the buyer anything they couldn’t get anywhere else. A tool that makes those faster just makes more of them.
Reputable agencies do it right
Pages for the towns around you work. We build them ourselves. The difference is how they’re made:
- Each page says something that’s only true about that town: how long the drive is, which of your stores is closer, what buyers there tend to shop for. Not the same paragraph with the name swapped out.
- They go up a few at a time, and get checked in between. If the numbers don’t look right, the plan changes before more of the same gets built.
- The agency shows you the results in your own Google data, not a screenshot of a chart.
If an agency offers you hundreds of pages in a week, ask to read three of them for different towns side by side. If the only way you can tell them apart is the town name, Google can tell too.