Location pages for Geneva communes: when they help local SEO, and when Google sees doorway pages

What do Google's spam policies say about doorway pages?

Google's spam policies define doorway abuse as sites or pages created to rank for specific, similar search queries, which lead users to intermediate pages that aren't as useful as the final destination. Two of the listed examples describe pages per commune directly:

• Having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page.
• Creating substantially similar pages that are closer to search results than a clearly defined, browseable hierarchy.

What's the risk for a site that multiplies city pages?

Google detects these practices through automated systems and, as needed, human review that can result in a manual action. Sites that violate its policies may rank lower or not appear in results at all.

In 2015, Google published questions to help spot a doorway page. Two apply to commune pages. Do they duplicate a grouping of locations that already exists on the site, to capture more search traffic? Do they exist as an "island", difficult or impossible to reach from the rest of the site?

Two more policies affect local sites. Since March 2024, scaled content abuse covers generating many pages for the primary purpose of manipulating rankings, no matter how they're created: 45 variants written by hand or generated with AI are treated alike. And the keyword stuffing policy lists blocks of text that name the cities and regions a page is trying to rank for. A footer reading "We serve Carouge, Lancy, Onex, Thônex, Vernier, Meyrin..." repeated on every page matches that example.

Duplicate content and canonical URLs: what happens to near-identical pages

Duplicate content is not, in itself, a violation of Google's spam policies, and its documentation says so plainly. But when Google finds several pages whose main content is very similar, it clusters them and marks as canonical the one it judges most complete and useful. The others are crawled less often, and the search result usually points to the canonical page.

In Search Console, the Page indexing report flags this with a status such as "Duplicate without user-selected canonical". If your Vernier page shows up there with your Meyrin page as the canonical, Google treats the two as one page. Its advice: make sure their content differs substantially.

Don't point the canonical tag of every commune page at your home page: that amounts to asking Google not to show them. If two pages really are duplicates, merge them and redirect the old URL. And the commune's name in the URL (/body-shop-meyrin) is not enough: according to Google's SEO starter guide, keywords in the URL path alone have hardly any effect on ranking.

What makes a commune page helpful, according to Google?

Google has no rule written for commune pages, but its page on helpful, reliable, people-first content asks questions that fit them well:

• Would your audience find this content useful if they came to you directly?
• Does the content show first-hand expertise, such as the kind that comes from visiting a place?
• Does it provide original information that other websites don't already have?
• Are you writing to reach a word count? Google says it has no preferred word count.

The erased-name test

I boil those questions down to a test I run with every client: delete the name of the commune and read the page again. If it still says something your other pages don't, it belongs. If it becomes interchangeable with the Lancy page or the Onex page, it has no reason to exist on its own.

What a commune page doesn't change: the map and your Business Profile

For local results on Google Maps and Search, Google lists distance among the main ranking factors: how far each business is from the customer who's searching. A "Body shop in Meyrin" page can rank in the regular web results and persuade its reader; it doesn't move your workshop any closer to Meyrin on the map.

Google Business Profile follows the same logic: one profile per business, at a real address, with no virtual office opened in a commune to show up there and no keywords in the address. To show where you work, you use the service area:

• A business that serves customers at its address and also travels to them is a hybrid business. Google's guidelines name auto repair shops that have a garage and offer roadside service as an example.
• You can set up to 20 service areas, by city or postal code for instance, but no longer as a radius.
• Google says the overall area shouldn't extend more than about 2 hours of driving time from where the business is based.
• If you don't serve customers at your address, remove it from the profile.

Structured data: one real address, and areaServed without expectations

For LocalBusiness structured data, Google asks you to define each business location as a LocalBusiness, with the most specific subtype possible (for a body shop, schema.org offers AutoRepair). The required properties are the name and the physical address. So a commune page shouldn't carry a LocalBusiness with a Carouge address when the workshop is in the City of Geneva: Google requires markup to be a true representation of the visible content, and misleading markup can lead to a manual action.

To describe your area, schema.org has the areaServed property, the geographic area where a service is provided. It isn't on the list of properties Google says it supports for LocalBusiness. You can use it to list the communes you actually serve, without expecting a visible effect in search results.

What goes on a useful commune page?

A useful commune page answers the questions a customer from that commune asks on the phone. For a body shop, a garage, a tradesperson or a home service business, I ask the client to gather these before a single line is written:

• Real access: the route to the workshop, with the travel time you measured at the hours customers actually come, and where to park.
• Pickup and return: which days, how long it takes, any fee and what the customer needs to have ready.
• Jobs done in that commune, in a few sentences: the vehicle, the damage, the repair and the turnaround, with the customer's consent.
• A photo of a real job, taken by you rather than pulled from a stock library.
• Constraints you know from experience, for example an underground car park that's hard to get into, or pickup times that suit commuters.
• The questions customers from that commune ask, rather than one FAQ copied from page to page.

Template page or useful page: a Meyrin example

The template page reuses the Vernier introduction with "Meyrin" swapped in, then adds a list of neighbourhoods and a stock photo. It opens with "Looking for a body shop in Meyrin? We are at your service for all your repairs."

The useful version is built from your own data: the measured driving time from Meyrin to the workshop at the end of the day, the days you collect cars, the turnaround, and the latest job done in the commune (the vehicle, the damage, the repair, how long it took), with a photo. If two of your pages could swap paragraphs without anyone noticing, Google may well cluster them.

How many commune pages should a Geneva business create?

The canton has 45 communes, including the City of Geneva, Carouge, Vernier, Meyrin and Lancy, according to article 1 of the Geneva law on the administration of communes. No Google document sets an acceptable number of pages. My rule: one page for each commune where you can fill in the list above with true facts, none for the others.

I start from the last twelve months of invoices or bookings: where customers come from, and how far the service travels. The list is often short. Communes you rarely work in can share a single "Service area" page, one sentence each. As for the 20-area cap on your Business Profile, it says nothing about how many pages to build.

The site of ProImpact Carrosserie, an independent body shop at Rue Voltaire 22 in Geneva (I built its website with Safwan Abdirahman), is one example: four commune pages (Carouge, Vernier, Meyrin and Lancy), five service pages, a six-article blog and AutoRepair/LocalBusiness and FAQPage structured data. The commune pages rest on a real service, vehicle pickup across the Geneva region; the home page links to all four, and each of them links to the service pages.

How should commune pages link to the rest of the site?

Google says every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site, with descriptive anchor text placed in a sentence. A commune page that only the sitemap mentions looks like the "island" from the 2015 questions. The structure I use:

• A "Service area" page, or a section of the home page, that introduces each commune in a sentence and links to its page.
• From each commune page, links to the relevant services and to the contact page, with anchors such as "wheel repair" rather than "learn more".
• From a service page or a blog post, a link to a commune only when the text talks about it, for example a job done in Lancy.
• No footer block of 45 links: Google advises against chaining links next to each other, and that list matches the keyword stuffing example.

Pages per commune: the checklist

Before publishing a commune page, check each point:

• You actually serve customers in this commune, and your invoices show it.
• The page has at least one fact specific to the commune: route, pickup, access constraint or recent job, with a real photo.
• With the commune's name deleted, the text is still different from your other pages.
• No list of communes or neighbourhoods added for SEO.
• One Google Business Profile, at your real address, with no more than 20 service areas.
• One address in your structured data, the business's own.
• Each page gets a link from the home page or a service area page, and links to your services and contact page.
• In Search Console, the URL Inspection tool shows that Google kept each page as its own canonical URL.

Planning pages per commune?

At Kollowo, I build websites for small businesses in French-speaking Switzerland and Quebec, with local pages based on real jobs and real service areas. If you're unsure which communes to cover, write to me.