Doorway Pages
Doorway pages are near-identical pages created per city or keyword purely to catch searches — the same template with a place name swapped in. Google's spam policies target them explicitly, and the modern penalty is usually quieter: the pages simply never index.
Check whether each page provides information specific to its target. A "roofers in Phoenix" page that would read identically for Tucson after changing the city name is a doorway. A Phoenix page with measured recommendation data, an openness score, and county contractor density provides city-specific information.
Google's documentation focuses on what the page provides to visitors. Pages that send users to the same destination without adding useful information can qualify as doorways regardless of how they were generated. A city page should answer a local question before directing the reader to a contact form.
Compare sibling pages after removing shared navigation and footer content. Measure how much of the remaining text is common to both. Routeless uses a minimum uniqueness threshold and fails the build when sibling overlap exceeds it, allowing the issue to be corrected before publication.
Uniqueness alone is not enough. Automatically changing adjectives, sentence order, or examples can lower text overlap without adding value. Review whether each page contains facts, choices, and next steps specific to the location or category, and whether a visitor would lose useful information if the page were removed.
Do not generate a page when there is no location-specific information to publish. A template may support 300 cities even when the data supports only 30. Routeless returns 404 for unmeasured cities instead of publishing a generic template with a changed place name.
The Routeless city pages follow this standard. Programmatic SEO explains how data and templates can produce useful page sets.
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