I've a question about how "Doorway pages" fit into SEO strategy for multi suburb/city pages e.g. for a electrician trades.

Posted by: @aldesylcen

Google has guidelines about not having doorway pages - e.g.

"Having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page"

https://developers.google.com/.../guidelines/doorway-pages

 

I'm still seeing plenty of sites (often lead gen or trades-based) where each suburb landing page only having 1-2 paragraphs of locally relevant info and a map. Yet 1-2 paragraphs of similar/identical CTAs and trades info.

/location

/location/SuburbA
/location/SuburbB
...
/location/SuburbZ

 

Often a spun-content site will even spin the suburbs or post codes based on a list and present 20+ different location pages.

 

1. If playing by Google's guidelines - how do SEO'd sites or multi suburb ones "get away with it" and still rank?
2. Is this against the google guideline or is there something I'm missing here?
3. If it is against the guidelines, what's a great play to capture surrounding suburbs (beyond GMBs)?

Thanks for your insight. 

“doorway pages” is a myth. Nothing wrong with targeting specific Geo and / or city+service. Test it and see for yourself though is what I would recommend.  While some people choose to create pages with exact content just replacing headers, link such as /city-name/ I personally like creating each location page with unique content that provides benefit to those customers in that area.