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Doorway Pages

What makes a page a doorway page

The tell is repetition: swap the city, keep the rest, publish the batch. Every page aims at a search, and none of them is written for the person who arrives.

Volume is not the problem, and you can run a lot of pages and be fine. The trouble starts when a page has nothing of its own to say, and the page next to it says the same nothing.

Doorway pages also funnel, so every route leads to one form, one number, one place. The page is a hallway rather than a room.

Doorway describes a purpose, not a kind of page. A location page, a service page or a campaign page can each be honest, and each can be built as a shortcut instead.

Why a few thin pages can hurt the rest

Search engines read a site as a whole, and a stack of near-copies suggests the site was built for crawlers rather than for people.

So your good pages end up carrying the weight of the ones you forgot about. Cleanup beats output here, because one page that is genuinely useful outweighs a shelf of copies.

There is a practical cost as well. When every page says the same thing, you cannot tell which one did anything, so your own reporting turns into guesswork.

The fix is rarely delete it all. Merge the copies into one page that answers the question well, then link to it from the places people actually start.

How to tell a real local page from a copy

Try this on a page you already have. It takes about a minute, and the answer is usually plain. If you flinch at any of these, you found your problem.

• Cover the city name. If the page still reads fine for anywhere, it is a copy.
• Look for detail only you could write, such as your hours, your crew, the streets you serve.
• Check the photos. The same stock art on every page is a hint.
• Read the first paragraph out loud. If it says nothing, a visitor feels that too.

How Microsite Generator handles this

Every page runs through the compliance gate before it can publish — a check that stands between a draft and the public. The platform's page generator refuses pages that are a template with the town swapped, and edits that make pages too alike are refused too.

Then it asks whether the page is still different from the ones beside it. Copies fail that test on purpose. What passes is individually built, and checked against Google Search Essentials and modern web standards.

You can still write pages by hand, and they go through the same check. The bar sits in the same place whoever writes the page, which is the point of putting a check in front of publishing at all.

Updated September 2026