Short answer
Google's spam policies treat doorway pages, such as many near-identical pages aimed at different towns, as spam, and they also cover scaled content made mainly to rank. Area guides avoid both when each page is written about one specific place, contains knowledge that would not fit any other place, and is published because it helps someone deciding where to live. Fewer, stronger guides are safer and more useful than dozens of interchangeable ones.
Area pages are a natural fit for agency websites. You know your patch better than almost anyone, and people moving into an area want exactly that knowledge. But area pages are also one of the easiest ways for a website to drift into practices that search engines treat as spam. This guide explains where the line sits and how to stay on the right side of it.
What Google says
Google's spam policies for web search define doorway abuse as pages or sites made to rank for particular, closely related searches, which send visitors to intermediate pages that are less useful than the real destination. Its examples include near-duplicate sites that differ only slightly in address and home page, and sets of pages or domains aimed at particular cities or regions that all channel people towards a single page.[1]
The same policies also describe scaled content abuse: generating many pages for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings rather than helping users, however the content is produced.[1] A batch of fifty area pages produced from one template with the town name swapped could fall under either heading.
The consequence is not limited to the offending pages. Google can rank a site lower, or remove pages from its results, when it detects spam practices, and a site carrying a large number of thin pages may struggle to rank its good pages too.
The swapped-name pattern
It is easy to recognise. A typical example reads something like this:
"[Town] is a vibrant and popular place to live, with excellent transport links, a range of local amenities and highly regarded schools. Whether you are a first-time buyer or looking for a family home, [Town] has something for everyone. Browse our latest properties in [Town] below."
Every sentence could apply to almost any town in the country. Replace the name and the page is equally true, and equally useless, for the next town along. A visitor learns nothing, and a search engine sees one page repeated many times.
A simple test for every area page
Before publishing an area guide, ask five questions:
- Would this page still be true if I swapped the place name? If yes, it is not yet an area guide.
- Does it contain something only someone who knows the area would say? A particular street, a local quirk, a realistic commute, which side of town floods, where people park.
- Would a person moving here find it useful even if they never contacted us? If the only purpose is to rank and push people to listings, it is closer to a doorway.
- Are the facts checked and dated? Transport times, school names and council details should come from official sources and carry a review date.
- Is there a reason this area has its own page? If you cover it but have nothing specific to say, it may be better mentioned on a branch page or a broader guide until you do.
Structure that encourages substance
A fixed template is part of what produces swapped-name pages. If every guide has the same headings in the same order, writers fill them with the same generic sentences. A better approach is to give each guide a structure that follows what matters in that place.
| Type of place | What might lead the guide |
|---|---|
| Commuter village | The morning train: realistic journey times, parking at the station, what happens when services are disrupted. |
| Coastal town | Seasonal change: summer crowds, holiday lets, parking permits, which streets are quiet in winter. |
| City neighbourhood | Housing types and what they mean: conversions, new-build blocks, terraces, and who tends to live in each. |
| Market town | The centre: what is within walking distance, market days, how the high street has changed. |
| Rural area | Practicalities: broadband, mobile signal, heating fuel, bin collections, school transport. |
Where the knowledge comes from
The best source of area knowledge is usually already in your office. Negotiators who show homes in an area every week know what buyers ask and what surprises them. A short interview, with notes written up afterwards, gives material no competitor can copy. Desk research is still needed to check facts, but it should support local knowledge, not replace it.
What to avoid in area guides
- Claims you cannot support. Do not promise price growth, describe crime levels or flood risk without an official source, or claim a property is in a school catchment without checking with the council.
- Copied text. Paragraphs lifted from council websites, Wikipedia or other agents add nothing and may breach copyright.
- Keyword stuffing. Repeating "houses for sale in [town]" in every paragraph reads badly and is itself listed among Google's spam practices.[1]
- Pages for places you do not cover. A guide to a town where you have no listings and no branch is hard to justify to a visitor.
How many guides?
There is no correct number. The right number is the number of places you can write genuinely useful guides about. For a single branch that might be a handful. For a group with many offices it might be dozens, but each one should pass the test above. It is better to start with five strong guides and add more as you build up knowledge than to launch fifty thin ones and try to improve them later.
Rewriting a thin page: a worked example
Take a fictional village with a thin area page that says it has "a strong sense of community and excellent transport links". To rewrite it, start with questions your negotiators can answer. Where do buyers in the village tend to come from? Which streets have the period cottages and which have the 1970s family homes? How long does the walk to the station really take, and is there parking when you get there? What do people say they miss after moving in?
The answers turn into sections that would be wrong for any other place: a paragraph about the two distinct parts of the village and the homes in each; a realistic description of the commute, with checked timings; a note about the single convenience shop and the farm shop a short drive away; and a short honest line about who might find the village too quiet. The result is longer, more useful and impossible to swap onto another town, which is exactly the point.
Connecting guides to the rest of the site
A good area guide links naturally to current listings in that area, to the branch that covers it, and to neighbouring guides. Those links help visitors and help search engines understand how your site fits together. Keep the listings section below the guide itself, so the page is a guide with listings rather than a listings page with a paragraph on top.
Is it wrong to have a page for every town we cover?
Not if each page is genuinely about that town and useful in its own right. The problem is pages that differ only by the place name.
Can we use AI tools to help write area guides?
Google's scaled content policy applies however content is produced. If a tool helps you organise your team's knowledge, the result can still be good. If it generates generic text about many places at once, the result is likely to be the swapped-name pattern.
Should old, thin area pages be deleted?
Not automatically. Some may have useful visits or links. Review each one: improve it, merge it into a stronger page with a redirect, or retire it if it has no value.
Sources
Checked on 29 October 2026. Each entry says what kind of source it is.
- Spam policies for Google web search, Google Search Central (platform documentation)