

How to fix 'duplicate content' issues for city-specific pages - googy

Hi! I've put together a very basic lead generation site. To cater to different cities, I've linked a list of the most populous cities in the U.S. to modified versions of my index page. So far, I'm only appending "in $city" to the title and h1 tag.<p>How big of a problem is this for search engines?<p>I would like to present the same information to each state. So, besides including a dropdown for states, how else would you have a page dedicated to each city without tripping the duplicate content wire?
======
gexla
You probably don't need to worry about duplicate content. Some SEO's claim
that here isn't even a real penalty for duplicate content. The real issue is
more simple, how to rank for things using content that lot's of other people
are using. This is a problem especially for people using data feeds
(affiliates for example) which could be used by a ton of other people.

Have you done your keyword reasearch? Are you trying to target certain
keywords? Or are you just going for general search engine traffic? If you have
done your keyword research then you should probably be able to answer your own
question. After looking at the search volume available and competition for
your keywords, then you pretty much have a blueprint as to what you need to
do.

For example, if you are trying to rank for the general term of
Blahblahwhateverwhocares, California then you are going to have an easier time
doing so than ranking for the general term of San Francisco, California.

So, there are a lot more factors you have to deal with before you get to
duplicate content.

