Insights · Field note · Growth and AI visibility
Why thin location pages now hurt you
Fifty pages that differ only by city name were once a tactic. They are now a liability for rankings, for citations and for the entity.
Thin location pages are templated pages, one per city or neighborhood, varying a place name across identical copy to capture local queries. Search engines treat them as low-value duplicates under thin-content policies, with the risk of a site-wide classification. Answer engines ignore them because none contains a specific answer or a verifiable author. And a hundred near-identical pages dilute the entity: the engine sees a firm that says the same thing everywhere and nothing anywhere. Real local pages are different: specific, signed, locally true.
In detail
What the evidence shows.
What they were for
Location pages were built to rank for “service in city” queries. The template was cheap and the pages ranked for a while in markets with little competition. Agencies sold them by the hundred. Many professional practice sites still carry them, often invisible in navigation and forgotten by the firm.
Why they fail now
Search quality systems identify templated near-duplicates and discount or remove them; a large enough set can affect the whole site’s standing. Retrieval systems looking for a passage to quote find nothing specific. Local AI answers draw on business profiles for location facts and on content for substance; a thin page supplies neither. In our audits (first-hand: David Selakovic) they are the most common category of pages we recommend retiring.
What a real local page contains
The specific location: address, hours, the people who work there, the services actually offered there, local obligations or referral patterns, and an author who practices there. Facts that match the business profile exactly. A reason for the page to exist beyond a search query.
Cleaning up
Inventory the location pages with their traffic and inquiries. Keep and rebuild the ones for real locations with real content. Redirect the rest to the best real page. Record it in the migration map so nothing is lost by accident. See Google Business Profile versus website content and authority content versus programmatic SEO pages.
By David Selakovic · Published 2026-10-16 · Revised 2026-10-16 · Reviewed every 180 days