A page for every city is not a local strategy
If you strip the city name and two sibling pages still agree, you do not have a local page. You have a doorway.
Between 2022 and 2025 this domain served URLs such as /blazor/City/Republic_of_Moldova/Raionul_Causeni/Pervomaisc and /angular-developers-ready-for-hire/City/Canada/Saskatchewan/Consul. The Wayback Machine still has them. The copy swapped the place name into a template. The Internet Archive lengths sit in a few-hundred-byte band of each other. That is the fingerprint.
The intent was ordinary: rank for “Blazor developer” plus a place, attract a client, look larger than a Minneapolis LLC. The method was the one search systems spent 2024 and 2025 teaching the rest of us not to use — scaled content where the only differing tokens are geography.
What a crawler actually received
A Blazor paragraph, a city token, a country token, and a link back to a hub. No office in that city. No engagement there. No fact a competitor could not regenerate from a gazetteer and a synonym for “we do Blazor.” Information gain was zero. Page count was the feature.
What we kept
- One URL per offer: staffing, custom software, technical SEO.
- One URL per stack we will actually staff or build.
- Redirects from the old city families onto those URLs, so whatever signals they collected move to a page that can rank.
- This article, because a postmortem is a fact the template never had.
When many URLs are still honest
A research surface may publish thousands of pages if each one owns a different answer — a different nearby park, a different permit, a different facility list. Parks Manager is built that way on purpose. The test is the same test we failed here: strip the place name, and see whether anything remains. If it does not, do not ship the page. Canonical the duplicate at the winner.
If you are sitting on the same pattern
Do not add more cities. Measure how many distinct answers you have. Point the rest at the winners. Take the losers out of the sitemap. Then write the page you can defend on a sales call without opening a spreadsheet of towns.