Nearly a decade ago, I wrote a post explaining how Google doesn’t really change the rules when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). While they change the algorithm quite often, virtually all of those changes are simply to tighten up what they’ve been telling us for years.

Now they’re coming after useless “location pages” on websites, and it’s about time. These are the pages you’ll see on some websites, often for home services like plumbing and electrical, that have dozens of pages that are virtually identical. All of the pages will have the same basic content, just swapping out $city_name on each page. Here’s an example list of those pages from a site:

Google is rightfully cracking down on those, as they provide no real value to users. There is still a chance they could work well if you take time to custom create unique content on every page, but even that is likely to fade in the coming months.

As with most changes, there is some good and some bad. At the most basic level, this means that you can no longer rank as well in other cities, but it also means that your competitors in those other cities can’t rank as well in yours.

What to do?

There’s not a lot you can do, as Google doesn’t want you to rank in cities where you don’t have a true presence, but there are still some actions you can take. Search Engine Land has a good list from a few months ago, including these two ideas:

Local newspaper press releases
Reach out to local newspapers in the surrounding areas and issue a press release.

Brag about your company regarding a past or upcoming charitable contribution or discount you give. Newspaper and local publishing sites typically link back to your website.

Join multiple local Chambers of Commerce
These typically have an annual fee associated with each one you join, but each city you or your client is targeting has one.

If it’s in your budget, join them for the location-relevant links and geographic authority.

For now, it seems you’re pretty safe to leave them on your site as the only real downside is that Google will just remove them from their index, making them useless but also harmless. That may change over time, though, so my advice would be to start removing them now to avoid any potential penalty in the future.

It’s long been known that keyword-rich domain names don’t really help with search rankings. If your site is “www.cheap-used-cars.com”, you’re not going to rank better for “cheap used cars” simply due to the domain name.

That said, I never really saw much downside to them. They don’t help, but they don’t hurt. However, Google’s John Mueller recently pointed out some reasons why they could cause some problems, and I found his thoughts rather insightful. Here are a few things he shared.

Spam: Those names can look spammy, which is never good.

Business Focus: If your site is “cheap-used-cars.com”, it’ll be weird if you try to add other services like vehicle repairs or tire services.

Nothing To Search For: Perhaps worse, it’s hard to search for you. If someone searches for “cheap used cars”, you might be in the list somewhere, but you might not be. If you had a more conventional name, you’d be easier to find. It’s similar to companies that got cute and put “near me” in their name, but now they’re simply difficult to actually find if you’re looking for them.

The last one is the killer for me. As a business your main goal shouldn’t be to rank high for unbranded terms (like “cheap used cars”), but to have people intentionally search for you because of your reputation. If you get fancy with names like this, people might want to find you specifically and struggle to do so because Google interprets your company name as a string of keywords instead.

This isn’t a problem I see much of anymore, but I thought it was a neat insight into some previously unknown drawbacks to those types of domain names.

I’ve come across two very different website visibility-related situations in the last few weeks, and I thought they were interesting cases on how Google is able to see your site. They’re both related to “the magic checkbox” being misused.

The first is with a friend of mine. They’re building a new site with another company, and I was curious how things were coming along. Their current site is, let’s say, “theirwebsite.com”. The new site is being constructed at “hidden.theirwebsite.com”. The problem is that the word “hidden” is meaningless by itself — you need to literally tell Google not to visit the site, which they failed to do. As a result, the site is completely open to Google and is being indexed as we speak, which is how I found it. This is foolish, and will likely lead to some negative impacts on their current site.

It’s like when Michael “declared bankruptcy” on The Office; you need to do more than just say it out loud.

The second story was more public, and more troublesome. An Arizona GOP Secretary of State candidate was furious that Google wasn’t showing his site in their search results. He referred to them as “crooks” with their “deep state algorithm”, that “deplatformed” him with their “censoring”. Here is a sample tweet of his:

The reason, of course, was the magic checkbox. His team had checked the box in WordPress that said “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” and, well, they did!

Google even responded directly to him, explaining what he did wrong and how he can fix it.

This points to some deeper problems at play with him here, involving either poor communication, a lack of trust, or simply a lack of competence. In his case, it almost feels like it was intentional and he really wanted to play the victim, because even after he was clearly shown the reason why, he continued to vent on Twitter about how awful Google was. It’s very strange. Techdirt has a great write-up of the entire incident if you’d like to read more.

This is a great example of how little things can make a huge difference. I expect only mild issues from what my friend did, but Mark Finchem’s site will be feeling the effects of this for weeks to come (it can take a while for Google to completely reindex and rank your site), and now a bunch of us have only heard of him because of this foolish mistake.

Really, it comes down to solid processes, and both of these examples are likely lacking in that area. A process can feel restraining at first (who wants more checklists?), but they help prevent situations like these so that you can focus on the job at hand without making simple, brutal mistakes.