Doorway Pages & Service Area Business

[MilestoneSEO_LA]

I see many national brand franchises that offers restoration services such as water damage (Servpro, Service Master etc.)

• There are local websites for each franchise.
• Each franchise has 50+ locations that they service
• They currently have pages like 'water damage + city' that have about 500-700 words each
• Some websites have 30- 100 location pages optimized for 'water damage city'
• These location pages do not have a physical offices
• None have duplicate content (word for word) above 20%
• The only different between these pages is perhaps 200 words about the city

Example: www.servicecompany/water-damage-los-angeles

www.servicecompany/water-damage-reseda

www.servicecompany/water-damage-van-nuys

Are these doorway pages?

[EGOL]

Are these doorway pages?

Doorway pages are a cluster of very similar, low-effort required pages that are produced for no reason other than to generate search traffic.

I don't think that you are going to get a rock solid answer.  In my opinion, you will only get opinions unless Google is giving an official answer.

In my opinion, what you describe are ARE doorway pages.  They are a little better than "cookie cutter pages" that simply swap the name, address, phone, etc. in and out between pages,  Google has been killing cookie cutter pages for at least ten years, though some have survived for at least that long.

The pages that you describe have a higher chance of survival but if anyone was going to produce a massive number of these pages they would start taking conscious or unconscious short-cuts that would probably make them moderately vulnerable to an algorithmic penalty.

If you want to do a good job on these pages.  Get the manager at each location to take a photo of the building, take a photo of the staff, write text about the physical location with a google map, write a little about the staff including their names, describe some of the jobs done in that area, include photos of their work if possible.  Hold their annual bonus until they hand in this work.  Hold next year's and each subsequent year's until they have a fresh update.