“Why does Google search suck so much these days?”
This is a far from uncommon sentiment if you’ve ever asked it. Despite the value Google has and the near undisputed monopoly Google has on the search market, it’s become a war zone. It’s become a massive flood of AI-generated slop, affiliate spam, copy-pasted trend chasing articles and – most pertinently – websites and companies using shady and unethical “SEO” tactics.
There are multiple blog posts’ worth of content that could be written about the numerous parties responsible for Google’s quality decline: Google itself (covered brilliantly by Ed Zitron), the advertising industry’s aggressive monetization push, the flood of AI content, and so forth. All of those are thoughtful topics but for right now I want to zero in on a particular black hat SEO technique that a worrying number of marketing agencies and even tech companies don’t just use but actively seem to pitch as a selling point even though Google explicitly discourages it: Location page spam.
For the uninitiated, “location page spam”, or doorway pages, is a practice that Google has discouraged for a long time and recently made a pledge to crack down hard on. This is a practice wherein a business or brand creates a very large number of nearly identical website pages, each specifically targeting a different town or city. The intent is to bolster the website’s overall rankings in Google search results for different potential markets.
Let’s take, for example, a website for a pizzeria located in Midtown, Manhattan. Location page spam would essentially be creating dozens of separate pages, all with identical content, with various location-based titles such as:
Pizza in Times Square
Pizza in Flatiron District
Pizza in Lower Manhattan
Pizza in Battery Park
Pizza in Chelsea
Pizza in Clinton
Pizza in Upper West Side
Pizza in Upper East Side
Pizza in Harlem
Each of these pages would essentially be duplicate pages with the barest possible adjustments; in a lot of cases, all location page spammers do is swap out the name of the town.
These pages offer nothing valuable to customers. A visitor to this pizzeria website from Times Square or the Flatiron District would essentially just be tricked into visiting a website less geographically relevant to them than a pizzeria website in Times Square or the Flatiron District respectively.
As a result, Google considers this a spam tactic and has gone on record stating that they will penalize websites that employ this tactic:
Doorway abuse is when sites or pages are created to rank for specific, similar search queries. They lead users to intermediate pages that are not as useful as the final destination. Examples of doorway abuse include:
- Having multiple websites with slight variations to the URL and home page to maximize their reach for any specific query
- Having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page
- Generating pages to funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of a site
- Creating substantially similar pages that are closer to search results than a clearly defined, browseable hierarchy
I should clarify that conversely, if you’re building out actual pages that are relevant to customers and targeted to location, you’re probably fine. If the Midtown pizzeria, to take the same example, has a page about the business and work it does in Times Square, a Google map indicating that they deliver to Times Square, or possibly photos of their food truck in the area, then all of that’s how to actually appeal to different demographic areas through search using a website. It isn’t considered spam because it’s actually putting in the work to show your business is relevant to customers in a separate geographical area. That’s also a lot harder to do than just copy and pasting the same page fifteen times,
It’s also why a worrying number of companies use this method – either ignorant of its repercussions with Google, or worse, just not caring either way.
I received a call from a representative from a fairly well-known POS tech company that I’ll just refer to as Acme. I’ll refer to the very polite sales rep as Jane for similar privacy reasons. Jane had been referred to me on behalf of a client – this itself is pretty common, as I’m often called upon to advise clients on new ideas and whether to engage with vendors or companies that reach out to them.
The first problem didn’t even involve doorway spam: Jane admitted that she wasn’t local to this area despite the phone call coming in from a local area code. When she later texted me a business case study, the area code was across the country entirely. This strongly suggests that Acme was using caller ID spoofing in order to appeal local even though they’re not.
As a result, I was already somewhat concerned. Furthermore, why lie by omission about something like this? I work with people who aren’t local and I have no problem with that. The idea is to engender trust by appearing local but anyone who verifies the information and finds out the truth is going to trust you less, not more. So that got things off to a rocky start.
Jane then delved into her pitch on behalf of Acme, eagerly talking about how their POS system assumed the role of a website. As I asked periodic questions, she touted as a selling point that Acme would set up pages for specific items and geographical locations to “boost” the website in search results. She texted me a case study, which I opened – and instantly saw the telltale signs of doorway spam. They weren’t even hiding it – they displayed it on the homepage.
It’s hard to tell from here, but in this completely redundant FAQ section, the website lists a huge number of menu items, and each comes with its own copy and pasted page:
https://(websiteurl).com/tags/spaghetti
https://(websiteurl).com/tags/calzones
https://(websiteurl).com/tags/garlic-bread
https://(websiteurl).com/tags/chicken-parmesan
https://(websiteurl).com/tags/calamari
https://(websiteurl).com/tags/chicken-wings
https://(websiteurl).com/tags/caesar-salad
https://(websiteurl).com/tags/garlic-bread
https://(websiteurl).com/tags/lasagna
https://(websiteurl).com/tags/meatballs
Every single listed item, including breakfast, lunch, dinner, delivery, and takeout, along with the areas served section that I’ve left closed to not give this pizzeria’s identity away, has the exact same page structure:
It’s a duplicate structure with a generic title like “Order (dish name) online from (pizzeria name).” The description is almost identical across each page with only some rudimentary changes. Here’s the kicker, though: Let’s see what happens if I plug the Antipasto Salad description into an AI-generated text checker like ZeroGPT:
There it is: The cherry on top of this spam pie. This company is actively selling a shady SEO tactic that Google actively penalizes, and then to add insult to injury, all of the content is AI-generated in a way that Google absolutely classifies as scaled content abuse:
Examples of scaled content abuse include, but are not limited to: Using generative AI tools or other similar tools to generate many pages without adding value for users
At this point, I carefully inquired to Jane about the nature of doorway spam and asked how what Acme providing was any different than page location spam. Jane seemed genuinely taken aback and asked for more context – I explained in some more detail my understanding of page location spam and how what Acme was doing seemed to line up with it. I also mentioned that Google actively penalizes and discourages this.
It became clear immediately that Jane wasn’t sure what I was talking about, but offered to connect me to someone else at the company who was “much smarter than her” (her words) to have a conversation. I opted to decline – at this point there were so many red flags that it didn’t seem worth the client’s time, especially since the client already has a POS and a website not locked into the specific platform.
Jane’s apparent lack of knowledge here was the last straw – and to be clear, I take no issue with Jane herself. Ultimately she’s just a sales representative acting on a company’s directive. Even so, if Jane didn’t know that Google discourages this behavior and couldn’t differentiate Acme’s business from it, that means one of three things:
- Their sales reps aren’t trained well, which is bad
- Their sales reps aren’t informed of this, which is worse
- Their sales reps are informed of this and told to disregard it, which is worst of all
There’s even a fourth alternative – that Acme itself doesn’t know or didn’t bother with any baseline due diligence. In which case we arrive at the question: What business does this company have promoting itself as a POS marketing technology vendor?
Acme here may be a particularly egregious case of it, but unfortunately, they’re not an isolated one. I’ve mentioned earlier but it’s worryingly common for tech platforms to push doorway spam as a legitimate promotional tool for their small business “marketing kit” or for digital marketing agencies to build these sorts of pages into websites as part of an SEO package. This often happens without the client’s knowledge or the client even understanding.
In turn, this approach validates bad behavior. It leaves small businesses who don’t know any better holding the bag when Google eventually and invariably catches wind of what’s going on and penalizes them accordingly – after the small business has paid out hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of fees.
Platforms are essentially – ignorantly or not – treating an actual black hat SEO technique that Google will eventually penalize as part of “standard SEO.” Which speaks volumes to the issue I raised earlier about Google search’s current problems.
If you’re a small business, absolutely make sure doorway pages aren’t something being done without your knowledge. If you’re a platform doing this, well. You’ll probably get away with it for a while, but when Google notices, don’t say you weren’t warned. It may also be helpful to ask yourself why you’re doing this in lieu of ethical practices. This ultimately isn’t just about bad SEO practices. It’s a breach of integrity between business owners and the platforms they rely on to guide them, and clients deserve better.