Will a GEO Localization site create thousands of duplicates?

[Ideas-Money-Art]

Hi mozzers,

We are about to launch a new site and right now I am worried that this new site may create thousands of duplicate content which will harm all the SEO that has been done in the last few years.

Here is a situation:

You land on the example.com/Los-angeles page (geo located) but if you modify URI to example.com/chico then a pop up appears and ask you for the location you want to be in (pop up attached). When choosing chico the URI switches to example.com/chico?franchise=chico instead of /chico only. This site has over 40 different microsites so my question are all these arguments ?franchise=city going to be indexed and create thousands of dups? or are we safe because this geo localization happens thanks to javascript?

Thanks!

GopRinh.png

[AlexMcKee]

For the most part I'm going to restrict my answer to the technical part of your question but do have a think about whether the pages are actually duplicates. If they represent different franchises of companies then they may well be relevant content pages. Think in terms of resources.

You can't assume the query string will remain undiscovered by Google. It only takes someone linking with the query string attached for it to be found. Over time many of the near-duplicates may be discovered in this way. You can instruct Google on how to handle URL parameters.