Google's spam update hit copy-paste town pages. Audit yours

On 30 September, Lily Ray, an SEO consultant who documents Google updates in public, posted another site hit by the spam update rolling out that week: 143 service pages, one per county, all built from the same template. Its traffic had climbed, held for a while and then fallen away. In Portugal the same build would be one page per concelho, the kind of set that appears when someone writes one town page and copies it for every town on the list. If your site has pages like that, the update has finished, so any effect it had on them is already in your data. Two browser tabs are enough to check whether those pages are the problem, and to decide page by page what to keep, fix, merge or remove.

TL;DR: Google's September 2026 spam update hit town pages copied from one template with only the place name changed. Audit yours with the swap test: keep a page with a fact only that town gets, improve the towns you want, merge the rest into one areas page with 301 redirects, and judge the result by enquiries over months.

What did Google's September 2026 spam update hit?

Sites that had multiplied one page across many places or keywords took the hardest hits when Google's spam update ran from 24 September to 8 October. The rollout took about two weeks, where this year's March spam update took one day and the June and August ones two days each. Google named no new tactic. The pattern reported by the people who track these updates was an old one: highly templated pages, programmatic pages with little unique value, AI text nobody reviewed, and doorway pages.

The 143 county pages are the plainest case of the last. Among Google's own examples of doorway abuse are "having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page" and "creating substantially similar pages that are closer to search results than a clearly defined, browseable hierarchy." A town page that repeats the same services list, the same three paragraphs and the same contact form, with Sintra where the page before it says Cascais, matches that description. Such sites usually carry a second tell from Google's list under keyword stuffing as well: "blocks of text that list cities and regions that a web page is trying to rank for", typically in the footer of every page.

Search Console, Google's free report on how your site appears in search, shows whether this touched you. Compare clicks to your town pages in the weeks before 24 September with the weeks after 8 October. A drop across the group of town pages, while the rest of the site holds steady, is the signal to act on.

How do you tell if your town pages are doorway pages?

Google objects to two kinds of page: those that exist to catch a search and pass the visitor on, and those that are substantially similar to each other. A town page for a place where your business works differently is a useful destination, and nothing in the spam policies counts against it.

The quick way to tell which kind you have is the town-name swap test. Open two of your town pages side by side and imagine putting one town's name into the other page. If every remaining sentence, photo, price and answer would still be true, you have published the same page twice, and a search engine has no reason to show both.

Owners ask about this on Reddit's SEO forum in almost exactly those terms. One, with ten area pages, wrote that "the only thing really different about them is the heading". Another asked whether it was fine "to keep the copy exactly the same, and only change the city name". A reply in that thread warned that pages differing only by location end up in Search Console marked "Crawled - currently not indexed", which means Google read them and chose not to show them. The other outcome is the one in Lily Ray's chart, where the copies rank for a while and then drop together.

Why rewriting the same page in new words doesn't fix it

Rewording each copy until a duplicate checker stops complaining is the usual repair, and it is the behaviour Google describes under scaled content abuse, which includes pages produced "through automated transformations like synonymizing, translating, or other obfuscation techniques" where "little value is provided to users". Whether a person or an AI tool does the rewording, the sentences change and the answer stays the same, and the answer is what gets compared.

We had to draw this line on our own site, where twelve pages for different trades share one layout, the same way eight town pages share one. A check in the site's code stops a page going live if it repeats another page's headline, description, the problems and solutions it lists, or its closing paragraph. One answer is allowed to repeat: the answer about cost, because the cost is the same on every page, and the comment in the test says rewording it twelve ways "would be the exact spam behaviour this file exists to prevent."

Your town pages work the same way. A fact that is true everywhere, such as your guarantee, your hours or how you quote, can repeat word for word. The reason each page exists has to be its own.

How to audit town pages after the spam update

Go through the town pages one at a time and ask what a customer in that town learns there that no other page tells them. For an owner-operated trade, the honest answers are usually a travel charge or call-out window that differs, the days your van covers the area, a local rule or condition (a council permit, the age of the housing, parking that changes how a job is done), jobs and reviews from that town, or someone based there. Each page then gets one of four outcomes:

1. Keep a page that already has its own fact, appears in searches for its town and has brought enquiries.
2. Improve a page for a town you do want, by adding that fact near the top, plus job photos and reviews from there.
3. Merge pages for towns with nothing distinct into one areas page, with a permanent (301) redirect from each old address, so links and bookmarks still land somewhere useful. The areas page names each town once, in a sentence, so someone searching for your trade there still finds a page of yours that mentions it.
4. Remove a page for a town you don't serve or don't want, and let it return a 404 or 410, the codes that tell Google a page is gone.

Picture a plumber based in Oeiras with eight town pages. Cascais brings most of the work, its older houses need a repair the plumber explains well, and forty reviews mention the town, so Cascais is kept and improved. Sintra brings two jobs a year at the same price and response time as everywhere else, so Sintra is merged into the areas page with five others. The plumber ends with two town pages and one areas page that says how far the van goes and on which days.

Then delete the footer block that lists every town in small print. It helps no visitor and it matches Google's own example of keyword stuffing.

How long until the fix shows in Google?

The merge itself takes weeks. Google's Gary Illyes put the typical time for a canonicalisation change, the process that folds duplicate pages together, at one to three weeks, and months when the signals conflict, according to Search Engine Journal's report of his talk in Barcelona on 2 October.

Recovery from a spam hit is a separate and longer wait, because Google re-evaluates a site on its own schedule rather than on the day you fix the pages. Glenn Gabe, an SEO consultant who tracks these updates, documented sites that cleaned up after earlier 2026 spam updates and only came back during this one, when the systems looked at them again. Judge the audit over the following months by enquiries from the towns you kept rather than by rankings.

If the town pages came with a site nobody maintains, our page on conversion-first websites explains how we plan a site around the enquiry you want, and our sector page for law firms shows what one of those twelve pages carries that the others don't.

Frequently asked questions

Should I noindex town pages instead of deleting them?

You can. Google's spam policy says of pages like these, "exclude it from Search", and a noindex tag (a line of code asking search engines to skip the page) does that while visitors can still reach it. For towns with nothing distinct, a merge with a redirect is cleaner, because it leaves one page to maintain.

Can one page cover several towns?

Yes. An areas page that names the towns you cover, says how far you travel, which days you reach each one and what you charge for distance answers what a customer in any of them needs to know. Name each town once, in a sentence, rather than in a list of keywords at the bottom of the page.

My traffic didn't drop. Do I still need to fix the town pages?

If they fail the swap test, yes. Templated pages that survived one update are still exposed to the next, and the site in Lily Ray's chart ranked well before it fell. Fixing them while nothing is broken lets you merge at your own pace and keep the towns that bring work.

What to do this week

Open Search Console and compare your town pages' clicks before 24 September and after 8 October. Then open your two busiest town pages side by side and run the swap test. If they pass, check that the fact making each one different sits near the top. If they fail, list your towns, mark the few with a real fact, and plan the merges for the rest.

If the website alone is the problem, our Foundation plan is a website we build and then maintain for you, monthly, and our plans page lists every plan with its terms.