Why it matters on an HVAC site
This is the most commonly sold deliverable in contractor SEO and the one most likely to be a policy problem. Three hundred city pages generated from one template, each funnelling to one contact form, is close to the policy’s own wording.
The line is not the existence of location pages. It is whether each page has a reason to exist for a person who lands on it.
How to check it yourself
- Read three of the pages as a homeowner in that town. If nothing on the page is specific to the town, the page has no reason to exist there.
- Measure shared text across the set. High similarity plus a single shared destination is the pattern the policy describes.
- Check whether the business genuinely serves the places. Pages for towns nobody has ever driven to are the clearest version.
Worked through in numbers
A contractor has 312 city pages. Shared text across the set is 96%. All 312 carry the same form and the same phone number.
The company genuinely works in 41 of the 312 places. The other 271 exist because the template accepted a list of every town in three counties.
The 271 were removed and returned 410. The 41 were rewritten one at a time with real local substance over four months. Total organic sessions fell for six weeks and were 34% above the old baseline by month five.
Where this sits in the rankings
Scored under Content. Pages made to catch a place name and funnel people somewhere else, and Google has a policy about them.