Programmatic pages for a local business without the duplicate-content penalty

If you build location pages programmatically ("service + city" templates), you've probably hit Google's "Duplicate, Google chose a different canonical" warning. Here's what actually moved the needle on a real static site.

What was broken

• 54 generated neighborhood pages, 100% orphan (zero internal inbound links).
• Canonicals pointing to .html URLs that 301-redirect to clean URLs → Google flags "page with redirect".
• Missing canonicals on a handful of pages.

The fixes

1. Canonicals to the final URL — never to a URL that redirects.
2. A real hub page linking every generated page, grouped by zone.
3. Sister-page links inside each page (neighbor zones + a cross-link to the related service).
4. Unique content per page — local landmarks and a distinct FAQ, not just a swapped city name.

Live example (a beauty studio in Toulouse): ys-glow.fr.

Bonus: clean internal links

Every internal link pointed to /page.html, triggering a 301 on each click and wasting crawl budget. Rewriting them to extensionless URLs removed the redirect hops entirely.

Small changes, big difference in how fast a new domain gets crawled.