TL;DR
A defence firm covering four counties wants a page for each. Reasonable instinct, and the easiest way to build a doorway set without meaning to. Location pages are not prohibited. Near-identical pages funnelling to one destination are. Make it about the court, not the town: twelve towns sharing four courthouses is four pages.
A defence firm covering four counties wants a page for each. Reasonable instinct, because the courts genuinely are different, and clients search that way.
It is also the single easiest way to build a doorway set without meaning to, and the difference between the two versions is not subtle once you know what to look for.
What Google actually prohibits
Worth quoting rather than paraphrasing. Google’s spam policies define doorway abuse to include “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.”
Notice what is not prohibited: having a page about a place. What is prohibited is a set of near-identical pages whose only function is to catch a place name and hand the visitor to the same destination.
So the question is never “are location pages allowed”. It is “is this page a document about something, or a net”.
The test
Could you write the second page without looking at the first?
For two genuinely different courts, yes. Easily, and you would struggle to make them similar even if you tried. For two towns in the same judicial district served by the same courthouse under the same DA, no. You would be writing the same page and changing a noun.
Which points at the right unit. The page should be about the court, not the town. Four counties with four different courthouses is four pages. Twelve towns inside those four counties is still four pages, because the twelve towns share four courts and nothing else distinguishes them.
That reframing usually reduces a proposed forty-page project to six, and makes the six defensible.
What genuinely differs, and therefore what goes on the page
This is the part that makes the page real, and a defence lawyer already knows all of it. It just rarely gets written down.
- The court itself. Where it is, parking, which building, what happens at the door, how long a first appearance typically takes.
- Local procedure. Arraignment scheduling, whether the county runs a diversion programme and who qualifies, bond practices, how continuances are handled.
- The prosecutor’s office. Not gossip. Observable policy. Whether that DA charges certain offences more aggressively, whether they have a standing position on first-offence DUI, how plea discussions usually open.
- What you have actually seen there. The judgement layer. How this court differs from the neighbouring one in practice, and what you do differently because of it.
Any single one of those makes the page non-substitutable. All four make it the most useful page on the subject anywhere, which is the actual goal.
The pack question, which people conflate with this
A county page will not put you in the map pack for that county. The pack ranks your Business Profile, and distance is measured from where your office actually is, and a page cannot move it.
What the county page does is compete in the ordinary results, where there is no distance constraint. That is the right expectation to set before anyone writes six pages hoping for a pack position they cannot get.
Google is explicit that the pack runs on relevance, distance and prominence, and adds that there is “no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google.” A page is not one of those three inputs. It is worth saying out loud to a firm that has been sold county pages as a map pack strategy, and worth reading alongside what actually decides the pack in this vertical, which is rarely what people expect.
How many, honestly
As many as you have distinct courts and real knowledge of. Usually three to six for a firm that genuinely practises across a region.
If the answer is “we would take a case anywhere in the state”, that is not a content strategy, and forty pages asserting it will read exactly like what it is. Write the ones you can write properly and let the rest be covered by the practice’s main pages.
The short version
- Location pages are not prohibited. Near-identical pages funnelling to one destination are.
- The test: could you write the second without looking at the first?
- Make it about the court, not the town. Twelve towns sharing four courthouses is four pages.
- Court logistics, local procedure, the DA’s observable policy, and what you have seen there.
- A county page will not get you into the map pack. Distance is measured from your office.
- Three to six pages, written properly. Not forty asserting statewide coverage.
If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. Criminal defense SEO covers the page set and the local layer. If you’re not sure which of several plausible problems is costing you, that’s what an SEO audit is for.
