Every service area build I take on starts with the same question from the owner. If I publish ninety town pages, will Google treat them as doorway pages?
The honest answer is that the page count is not the thing Google measures. I have built clusters of ninety pages that indexed at 97 percent, and I have been handed sites of twelve pages where every one of them was a doorway. The line sits somewhere else entirely, and Google moved the wording on it on 28 August 2026.
What Google’s doorway policy says now
The spam policy page was updated on 28 August 2026, and the section is no longer called “Doorways”. It is called “Doorway abuse”. The definition reads:
“Doorway abuse is when sites or pages are created to rank for specific, similar search queries. They lead users to intermediate pages that aren’t as useful as the final destination.”
Read the second sentence twice. The whole policy hangs on one word: intermediate. A doorway is a page that sits between the searcher and the thing they wanted. It ranks, it collects the click, and then it hands the visitor off somewhere else.
A town page that answers the query itself is not intermediate. It is the destination. If someone searches for an emergency locksmith in Croydon and lands on a page that gives them the Croydon coverage area, the Croydon call-out fee, the response time, and a phone number, nothing about that page is a waypoint.
The 2015 Google blog post on doorways is still live and still carries the best test I know. It asks whether the pages exist as an “island” that is hard to reach from the rest of the site, and whether the user has been funnelled to one central page they could have reached directly.
Doorway abuse and scaled content abuse are two different failures
People collapse these into one worry, and that is why the advice online is so muddled. They are separate sections of the same policy page and they fail for different reasons.
Scaled content abuse is defined as “when many pages are generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users”. That is about how the pages were made and what is in them.
Doorway abuse is about where the page sends you. You can fail one and pass the other. A hand-written page that dumps every visitor onto one generic contact form is a doorway with good content. Two hundred generated pages that each genuinely serve their town are not doorways, but they may still be scaled content abuse if the content is empty.
There is a third trap in the same document. The keyword stuffing section lists, as an example of the abuse, “Blocks of text that list cities and regions that a web page is trying to rank for”. That is the footer full of town names, and it is the fastest way to fail all three at once.
Source: Google Search spam policies, doorway abuse section, last updated 28 August 2026.
Is there a doorway pages penalty in Search Console?
No, and this trips people up constantly. I have had clients convinced they were sitting under a doorway penalty because a blog told them one existed.
Go through the manual actions documentation and there is no doorway action listed. Doorways appear once, buried inside the “Thin content with little or no added value” action, which tells you to “Check for doorway pages on your site”. So a doorway problem can surface as a thin content manual action, but there is no button in Search Console that says doorway.
Google also folded the old standalone doorway document into the spam policies page. If you have a bookmark to the old guidelines URL it now redirects.
What Search Console shows when Google just ignores them
Most of the time nothing is penalised at all. Google reads the pages, decides they add nothing, and quietly declines to index them. That is the far more common outcome and it looks like this in the Page indexing report.
Pages that stall on Discovered - currently not indexed were never fetched. Google saw the URLs and did not think they were worth the request. On a fresh location cluster this is normal for a week or two, and worrying past that.
Pages that sit on Crawled - currently not indexed were fetched and rejected. That is the real doorway signal. Google read the page and did not consider it worth a slot in the index.
Pages that land on Duplicate without user-selected canonical are the clearest tell of all. Google has looked at your Croydon page and your Bromley page and decided they are the same document with the town swapped. If a whole cluster reports this status, the template is the problem, not the page count.
What I do before publishing ninety of anything
The rule I hold to is that every page needs at least one fact that cannot be find-and-replaced. A postcode list, a travel time, a local price, a named landmark, a job actually done there. If I can generate the page by swapping one word, so can Google, and it will.
The second rule is that the page has to end the journey. No town page on any build I run forwards its visitor to a central enquiry form. The phone number, the price and the booking sit on the page the searcher landed on.
That is what the numbers come from. On a UK locksmith cluster built this way, 138 of 193 pages are indexed and still climbing. A mobile notary build sits at 243 of 250. A plumbing cluster is at 110 of 110. None of those are small page counts, and none of them are doorways, because the count was never what mattered.
If a cluster of yours is stuck, the location pages that index guide walks the template checks I run first.
Sources
- Google Search spam policies, doorway abuse, last updated 28 August 2026.
- Google Search spam policies, scaled content abuse, same page.
- An update on doorway pages, Google Search Central blog, March 2015, still live.
- Manual Actions report, Google Search Console Help.