Why City Pages Cloned From a Template Get Cited for No City (and the Test That Tells You Yours Are Clones)
Twelve city pages that differ only in the city name are one page to a search system, and it ranks that one page for none of the twelve. AI engines skip them entirely because there is nothing to quote that is true of one place. The delete-the-city-name test, what a real city page contains for a Los Angeles firm, and how to fix a set of clones without losing the URLs.
Short answer: A city page that could be moved to another city by changing the name is not a city page; it is a duplicate with a variable. Google has been discounting these since the helpful content updates and the 2024 core updates finished the job; AI engines never cited them, because a sentence that is true everywhere is not evidence about anywhere. The test is to delete every instance of the city name and read what is left. If it still makes sense, the page has to be rewritten. Rewriting means saying what is true of that place: the courthouse, the ordinance, the community, the language, the attorneys who go there.
Why did firms build them?
Because in 2015 they worked. A page per city with the practice name and the city name in the title picked up long-tail queries, and an agency could produce forty of them in a week. The results decayed through 2022 and 2023, and after the March 2024 core update most firm sites we audit have city pages with near-zero impressions and no rankings for anything.
The pages are still there, in the navigation footer, forty of them.
What does a search system see?
Forty URLs with the same template, the same paragraphs, the same headings, and one token that differs. It clusters them, picks one as representative (often the wrong one), and ranks the cluster weakly for the generic term. It does not rank Burbank's page for Burbank, because nothing on Burbank's page is about Burbank.
An AI engine building an answer to "family lawyer in Burbank" looks for sources that say something about Burbank. A page whose Burbank content is the word "Burbank" contributes nothing and is not cited.
The test
Take one of the pages. Remove every instance of the city name and the neighborhood names. Read the result.
- If it reads as a complete, sensible page about the practice: it is a clone.
- If it falls apart, because the sentences were about the courthouse, the ordinance, the communities and the routes: it is a city page.
Most fail. The pages that pass were written by someone who has been to the city.
What is on a real city page?
For a Los Angeles firm, the things that are true of one sub-market and not the others:
| Element | Example (landlord-tenant, Long Beach) |
|---|---|
| The courthouse | Unlawful detainers heard at the Long Beach courthouse on Magnolia; the department; the calendar |
| The local law | Long Beach's own tenant relocation ordinance and just-cause rules, which differ from the City of Los Angeles and from unincorporated county |
| The communities and languages | The Cambodian community, the Spanish-speaking west side; which languages the office takes calls in |
| The neighborhoods, meaningfully | Bixby Knolls, Belmont Shore, North Long Beach: which have rent-stabilized stock, which have new construction |
| The attorneys | Who appears at that courthouse, how often, since when |
| The logistics | Parking, the self-help center, the filing window hours |
| The local sources | The Long Beach Bar, the tenant and landlord associations, the local press that covers the ordinance |
| The matters that are common there | Relocation assistance disputes, port-worker tenancies, student housing near the university |
Eight hundred to twelve hundred words, none of which could be moved to Pasadena.
How do you fix a set of clones?
- List them with their impressions from Search Console. Most will be near zero.
- Pick the two or three cities that matter: the office's city, the courthouse's city, one adjacent city with real clients. See Los Angeles as twelve markets.
- Rewrite those pages to the table above. Keep the URLs.
- Redirect the rest (301) to the nearest rewritten page or to the practice page. Do not leave forty clones live next to three good pages; the clones dilute the set.
- Remove the footer list. A list of forty cities is a list, not coverage.
- Re-check in sixty days. Impressions on the rewritten pages should rise; the redirected URLs should drop out of the index.
What about the practice-times-city matrix?
The same rule. A "family law Burbank" page is justified when there is something to say about family law in Burbank specifically (the Burbank courthouse's family calendar, the studio-workforce custody schedules, the Armenian and Latino communities). It is not justified as a slot in a grid. Our matrix pages are written one at a time for that reason, and the ones we have not been able to make specific do not exist.
What does not work?
- Adding a paragraph of "local flavor" (the Rose Parade, the beach) to a clone. Still a clone.
- Spinning the paragraphs so the wording differs. Systems compare meaning, not strings.
- Keeping the clones "because they don't hurt". They do; they are the thin content that drags the site.
Where to start?
Run the test on three pages. If they fail, count the set, pick the cities that matter, and rewrite those first. The content strategy service does the rewrite and the redirects; the free visibility check reports which of the firm's city pages have any impressions at all and which cities the firm actually ranks in.
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