Location pages in Google’s crosshairs after October spam update
Search Engine Land » SEO » Location pages in Google’s crosshairs after October spam update
Within the last few months, service area business (SAB) websites started to see rank fluctuations aligned with the rollout of Google’s helpful content and spam updates around late August through October.
Chatter around those fluctuations picked up in the local SEO community during this period in various forums, including the Google SEO Mastermind Facebook group.
The common theme with sites that were impacted the most seemed to be related to duplicate content, specifically location pages – in other words, doorway pages.
However, sites weren’t getting directly penalized by rank. Instead, pages were being automatically deindexed, which in turn caused ranks to drop for queries related to the corresponding location pages.