Copy-paste location pages are getting hit again
One site lost visibility after building the same service page 143 times, one county at a time.
Another site has been hit by Google's current spam update, and the pattern is the same one we saw earlier this week. Lily Ray (@lilyraynyc) pointed to a site with 143 highly templated service pages, one for each county it covers. Her post about it opened with "That was fast...", meaning the damage showed up quickly after the update started.
A spam update is a ranking change aimed at sites that break Google's spam rules. The pages in question here are the kind most local businesses have thought about building. You write one page about your service, then clone it and swap in a place name, so you end up with a version for every county, town or postcode you serve. On paper it looks like coverage. To Google it can look like one page repeated 143 times.
The same trick, a new tool
Ray also made a point that is worth sitting with. She says the sites being hit right now for scaling low quality AI content are producing many of the exact same page types and templates that companies scaled with freelance writers before 2023. In other words the problem is not that a machine wrote it. The problem is that the pages are near-duplicates with a word changed, and they were never going to answer anyone's question any better than the first one did.
That matters because it tells you where the line sits. Writing individual pages that each say something real about a place, a job you did there, prices, travel, local rules, is not the thing getting flagged. Stamping out a hundred versions of one page is.
What to do if you have location pages
Count them. If you have more pages than places you can genuinely say something specific about, you have too many. Then open two or three of them side by side and read them. If the only difference between them is the place name, they are near-duplicates, and that is the pattern Ray is describing.
From there you have two honest options. Either rewrite the pages so each one contains information that only applies to that area, or cut them down to a single strong service page that lists the areas you cover. Both are better than leaving 143 clones live and hoping.
If your rankings have dropped in the past few days and you have a stack of templated location pages, this is the first place to look. If you do not have pages like that, this story does not apply to you and there is nothing to change.
This is one SEO reporting on one site, so treat it as a signal rather than a full picture of the update. But it is the second site she has flagged with the same shape of problem.
History repeats itself
another one hit by spam update. This time - 143 highly templated services pages, by county.