Best way to resolve duplicate content issue?

[TME_Digital]

Not sure about what to do about this - I have a client who has a ton of pages (around 1200) which are all City specific pages, for long-tail search.

These are all written with paragraphs in the format such as:

Order to [City] today.

So every page has essentially the same content. The site also only has 1562 pages, so with 1200 of them being City-specific same-content pages, that can't be good.

However the problem is that these pages still rank very well (usually Position 1 or 2) for the terms they're targeting, and bring in enough traffic and revenue to justify their purpose.

We also have Country specific pages, and these are all with unique content, rather than the scripted content on the City pages. So for example, for Italy we might have:

• Italy Page (Unique Content)
  • Rome (Duplicate Content)
  • Milan (Duplicate Content)
  • Venice (Duplicate Content)
  • etc. (Duplicate Content)

For a low traffic country (Austria), we tried to 301 the City pages to the Country page, but that only resulted in us seeing a drop in search results for the city keywords, from (usually) Position 1 to more like Page 3 or 4, so quite a drop.

So, without writing 1200 pages worth of unique content, what would your advice be?

[AsadMemon]

If you can't write them, get them written. Might as well be the best investment you make in SEO. You would be able to maintain and monopolize your position on the SERPs with 1200 pages of unique content, properly optimized and targeting long tail keywords. Since you mention, these pages are already ranking high and bringing in traffic, IMO you shouldn't try and get rid of them. I know this is not exactly the advise you are looking for but if you are serious about your SERPs then its definitely worth the while.

[warcom]

Is padding out the content on the duplicated pages an option?

ie: If you where to add additional information to those pages, and slightly re-word those pages (as opposed to completely re-writing them), this could be a step in the right direction.

What is actually being duplicated about the page?

• The content
• The page title

Because both of these should be able to be dynamically re-written.

Feel free to PM me some examples.

• Paul.

[TME_Digital]

Thanks for the reply - ideally the route we'd take is to have all of them rewritten, but the cost to do that is too simply high for ~1200 pages.

Further investigation shows that only around 500 of the 1200 pages actually bring in traffic, so we could lose (redirect to country pages) 700 of the pages, and write content for 500 - that would reduce the cost, but would still be fairly substantial. Will have to think about that; as you say, adding properly optimised unique content is definitely the way to go, just whether we can justify the cost.

[TME_Digital]

Thanks for the reply! Hmm, do you mean to add further scripted content to bulk out the pages? We currently have a lot of dynamic (so, near-duplicate, but basically duplicate) content on all of those pages - Page Titles are unique - but the content is the same, just replacing the City name in each paragraph. That's the problem really, so I'm not sure additional dynamic content will fix that unless I've got the wrong end of the stick?