The technique works when you have a real dataset and a repeatable query pattern. A template defines the structure, variables fill in the specifics, and the pages are published at scale. It is legitimate when each page carries genuinely useful unique information. It becomes doorway page spam, which Google's policies explicitly target, when the pages differ only by a swapped city name. The line is whether a visitor landing on one page gets something real. Google has been increasingly aggressive about demoting mass produced pages that exist only to catch a keyword variation.
Service businesses reach for this to cover every town they work in, and it usually goes wrong. Fifty city pages with identical text and a find and replace town name is the classic failure. If you want to do it well, give each page something true and specific: the jobs you have actually completed there, local permit or code notes, drive time, named neighborhoods, a local review. That is real work, which means you can probably support ten honest city pages and not fifty. Build the ten and expand as you earn real local content.
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