There’s a line in Google’s spam policy about pages targeted at cities that funnel users to one page. If your site has a location page for every suburb you service, and they’re the same page with the name swapped, you’re at a huge risk to be penalised.

The tactic of titling pages [YOUR SERVICE + SUBURB NAME] then making a page for every suburb known to man admittedly worked for a while, but this spam update specifically targeted this practice so expect that to change.

Content Overview

The two policies suburb pages violate

Google’s spam policies are public and short enough to read over a coffee. Two of them matter if you run location pages.

Doorway abuse

Google defines doorway abuse as sites or pages created to rank for specific, similar search queries. They lead users to intermediate pages that aren’t as useful as the final destination, because they aren’t the intended destination for viewers. One listed example is “having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page”.

That’s the standard suburb page build, in Google’s own words. Forty pages, one per suburb, each carrying the same service copy and the same enquiry form, all pushing the visitor to the same place.

Another listed example: “creating substantially similar pages that are closer to search results than a clearly defined, browseable hierarchy”. If your suburb pages sit in a list no customer would browse, and each is a near copy of the next, Google has described them.

Keyword stuffing

The keyword stuffing policy names something most location page sets keep near the footer. Google’s examples include “blocks of text that list cities and regions that a web page is trying to rank for”.

That’s the paragraph reading “we also service Joondalup, Wanneroo, Clarkson, Butler, Yanchep” with thirty more suburbs after it. It gets added because it feels like it helps, it’s actively hurting you now.

Rewriting them now with AI makes it worse

The usual fix, once someone points out the pages are duplicates, is to run them through an AI tool. Fresh opening paragraph, different sentence structure, a few words swapped for synonyms, and the duplicate content problem disappears.

Google’s scaled content abuse policy covers exactly that. It describes many pages generated primarily to manipulate rankings rather than help users. The focus is unoriginal content that provides little to no value, “no matter how it’s created”. The policy doesn’t ask how the page was produced, it asks whether the page was worth producing.

The same policy lists automated transformations among its examples: “synonymizing, translating, or other obfuscation techniques” where little value is added. Synonymising is what a rewrite pass does to a location page.

Obfuscation is Google’s word for it, the rewrite hides the problem instead of fixing it. Reword a page that had no reason to exist and you have a reworded page that has no reason to exist.
Statement panel setting out wording from the examples in Google's scaled content abuse policy, which lists synonymizing, translating, or other obfuscation techniques, with a note that rewriting changes the wording rather than whether the page was worth publishing.

None of this puts AI off limits, we use it every day. Drafting a page around real information you supplied is writing, producing forty variations of a page with nothing suburb-specific in it is the type of content that could be tanking your Google rankings.

The three-question test

No tools, no crawler, no AI chatbox, just the pages open in front of you and do this.

  • Swap the name. Replace the suburb name with any other suburb in the state. If the page still reads correctly, it fails.
  • Ask what’s new. Would a customer there learn anything they couldn’t get from your main service page? If not, the page is an extra click on the way to the page they wanted and Google knows it.
  • Point at the sentence. Find the section that makes the page local. Not the heading, not the meta title, not the footer suburb list. A section in the body copy or on the page.

Decision aid for assessing one location page with three checks. Swap the suburb name and see whether the page still reads correctly, ask what a customer in that suburb would learn that the main service page does not give them, and point at the sentence that makes the page local. The page is either kept and built on, or folded into the main service page with the URL redirected.
Most of the sets we look at fail the first check on every page. That’s not a reflection on the business that bought them. It’s how they were built, and for a few years it worked well enough that nobody questioned it.

If you’d rather run the test across the whole set with someone, that’s part of what our local SEO work involves.

What earns a location page

A page passes when it holds something you could only have written after working in that suburb. Around Perth, that’s easy.
Classification showing three sources of material that make a location page genuinely local. Work you have done there, such as completed jobs and photos. What the place is physically like, such as limestone retaining walls or sand pads. And how you operate there, including real travel time from the depot.

Completed jobs are the strongest material you have. Three or four projects in that suburb, with photos of the work, what you found and what it cost to put right. Someone in Bicton reading about a job two streets away is reading something no competitor can copy.

Housing stock carries a lot of it. Limestone retaining walls through the western suburbs, sand pads and new estates up the northern corridor. Heritage overlays, ageing reticulation, clay sewer lines under streets plumbed in the sixties, strata rules that change what you can park where. You already know which of those apply where you work, spend some time writing it down earnestly and accurately.

Then the operational detail. Your real travel time from the depot, whether you cover that area after hours, a council permit process that differs from the one next door. A team member who lives there. Reviews from customers who name the suburb.

Three or four pages carrying that beat forty pages without it.

What to do with the others

Consolidate first. Take everything useful out of the pages that failed the swap test and fold it into one strong service page. It’ll be better than any of the thin ones were, because the material is finally in one place.

Then redirect. Point each retired suburb URL at the service page it belonged to with a 301. Don’t leave 404s behind, and don’t send everything to the homepage.

Keep the handful you can fill. If you have real jobs, photos and local detail for four suburbs, keep those four and write them properly. Add another when you’ve done work worth writing about. The page count follows the work, don’t be lazy here or Google will catch you out.

Put the effort you were spending on page volume into your Google Business Profile instead. For most Perth trades and home services, that profile brings in more local enquiries than the suburb pages ever did. Categories, services, photos and a steady flow of reviews move the map pack, and the map pack is what people tap.

If traffic dropped away rather than wobbled, that’s a different job. Penalty recovery starts with checking Search Console for a manual action.

Stop counting pages and start counting proof

We sell local SEO, and a fair chunk of what gets sold under that name is page count. It’s the same instinct behind the 4,000-word guide nobody finishes, which is why you should probably stop writing ultimate guides. Forty suburb pages look like forty times the work. They’re one page of information split forty ways, with the local part missing.

Open your location pages and run the swap test on three of them. Ten minutes will tell you which way this goes. If most fail and you’re not sure what’s worth keeping, come and have a chat with us. We’ll go through the set and tell you honestly which ones can be saved.

Cam Dobie

Senior SEO Specialist