Fix library · Local
Location pages, and the line you should not cross
Almost every local SEO guide tells you to build a page for each town you serve. Google’s own documentation names large sets of near-identical pages as scaled content abuse. Both of those are true at once, and the difference between them is not the number of pages — it is whether each one says something a person in that town actually needed to know.
Many near-identical location pages
What SEOPert detected
Several pages were found that differ from one another only by a place name.
What this means
A page per town, built from one template with the name swapped, is the oldest tactic in local SEO and one Google names explicitly as scaled content abuse. The risk is not that the pages fail to rank — it is that they can take the rest of the site down with them.
How to fix it
- Read two of them side by side. If swapping the town name makes them identical, they are the same page.
- Keep the ones where you genuinely do different work: different staff, prices, projects, photographs, opening hours, or a real address in that town.
- Merge the rest into one page that lists the areas you cover. One good page about your service area outranks thirty thin ones, and cannot be penalised.
- Redirect the removed pages to the page that replaces them rather than deleting them outright.
On WordPress
- Use a redirection plugin to point each removed page at the combined one, so anybody arriving from an old link or search result still lands somewhere useful.
If you are handing this to a developer
301 the removed URLs to the consolidated page and drop them from the sitemap.
Check it worked. Read two of the pages side by side. If swapping the town name makes them identical, they should be one page. Re-run your audit after merging.
Related
Check your own site
See which of these apply to you.
The free audit checks up to 10 pages and tells you exactly what it found, in the same plain language as these guides. No account, no card.