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Why the old city pages should come down
In a nutshell
- Your site has 141 pages like “Used heavy equipment in Atlanta”: one per city, state or country, with the same layout and headings for every place, the wording shuffled and the place name swapped in. They were all made in June 2015. 139 of them come down; your Sacramento and California pages stay.
- Google does show them, but on average around page 5 or 6, where buyers don’t look, and Google’s own rules name this exact pattern as spam.
- One honest page saying you ship anywhere does their job better, and takes the risk away.
What Google’s own numbers show
From your site’s Google Search Console, the three weeks up to 22 September 2026:
Those 28 clicks are about 1 in 6 of all your site’s clicks. Not nothing, which is why each page’s backlinks (links from other sites) are checked first, and pages are 301-redirected (forwarded permanently) to the new shipping page, not simply deleted.
I also ran 30 real Google searches from the Sacramento area on 22 September, including “used heavy equipment atlanta” and “used heavy equipment houston”. None of the city pages showed up in any top 10. Marketplaces, local dealers and map listings took those spots. For the two Sacramento-area searches your homepage came first, not a city page; the Sacramento city page didn’t make the top 10 either. Your Sacramento and California pages stay because you’re based in the Sacramento area.
What Google’s rules say
From Google’s spam policies:
“Doorway abuse is when sites or pages are created to rank for specific, similar search queries.” One of Google’s examples: “Having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page.”
“Sites that violate our policies may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all.”
Source: Google Search Central, spam policies, read 23 September 2026.
Plainly: Google has not taken action against your site; its reports show nothing. But this is the pattern it says it acts against, and its wording is about whole sites, not just the pages themselves. Small traffic now, a risk later.
Why not just rewrite them?
A real page for each of 139 places would need something true to say about each place. You have one yard. A buyer in Atlanta needs to know you ship there and how, not to see a page with Atlanta in the title. Rewriting 139 pages would cost far more than this and would still be the same pattern.
What replaces them
- One real shipping page: you ship anywhere in the US and abroad, how trucking and export work, the ports, the paperwork, payment, and a WhatsApp or phone number.
- Each page’s backlinks checked first; then a 301 redirect to the shipping page, or a 410 (gone) where nothing links to it, so visitors still land somewhere useful.
- Menus and links that pointed at the old pages are fixed, and Google’s reports are checked afterwards.
- Your Sacramento and California pages stay, because you’re based in the Sacramento area.
- The 11 rental pages stay, reworded honestly: you don’t rent, you pass renters to a company you trust.
It’s part of the SEO setup on the main page.