Kill the thin city pages dragging you down

Somewhere along the way a lot of local businesses were told to make a page for every town in a 40-mile radius. It's one of the fastest ways to hurt your rankings. Google calls them doorway pages, near-identical location pages built to catch searches, and it actively demotes sites full of them.

Spot the dead weight

The tell-tale signs: a stack of town pages with the same copy and only the place name changed, pages for towns you don't really serve, or pages with almost no content. They don't rank, and worse, they drag down the pages that could.

Merge, enrich, or cut

For each thin page, pick one: enrich it into a real location page (if the town is worth it), merge several weak ones into a stronger regional page, or noindex and remove the ones for towns you can't serve. Fewer, stronger pages almost always lift the whole site.