Duplicate Content, Canonicalization may not work in our scenario.

[PM_Academy]

I'm new to SEO (so please excuse the lack of terminology), and will be taking over our companies inbound marketing completely, I previously just did data analysis and managed our PPC campaigns within Google and Bing/Yahoo, now I get all three, Yipee! But I digress.

Before I get started here, I did read: http://moz.com/community/q/new-client-wants-to-keep-duplicate-content-targeting-different-cities?sort=most_helpful and I found both the answers there to be helpful, but indirect for my scenario.

I'm conducting our companies first real SEO audit (thanks MOZ for the guide there), and duplicate content is going to be our number one problem to tackle.  Our companies website was designed back in 2009, with the file structure /city-name/product-name.  The problem with this is, we are open in over 50 cities now (and headed to 100 fast), and we are starting to amass duplicate content.  Five products (and expanding), times the locations... you get it.

My Question(s):

How should I deal with this?  The pages are almost identical, except listing the different information for each product depending upon it's location.  However, for one of our products, Moz's own tools (PRO) did not find all the duplicate content, but did find some (I'm assuming it's because the pages have different course options and the address for the course is different, boils down to a different address on the very bottom of the body and different course options on the right sidebar). The other four products duplicate content were found and marked extensively.

If I choose to use Canonicalization to link all the pages to one main page, I believe that would pass all the link juice to that one page, but we would no longer show in a Google search for the other cities, ex: washington DC example product name. Correct me if I'm wrong here.

**Should I worry about the product who's duplicate content only was marked four times out of fifty cities?  **I feel as if this question answers itself, but I still would like to have someone who knows more than me shed some light on this issue.

The other four products are not going to be an issue as they are only offered online, but still follow the same file structure with /online in place of /city-name.  These will be Canonicalized together under the /online location.

One last thing I will mention here, having the city name in the url gives us a nice advantage (I think) when people are searching for products in cities we offer our product. (correct me again)  If this is not the case, I believe I could talk our team into restructuring the files (if you think that's our best option).

Some things you need to know about our site:

We use a cookie for the location.  Once you land on a page that has a location tied to it, the cookie is updated and saved.  If the location does not exist, then you are redirected to a page to chose a location.  I'm pretty sure this can cause some SEO issues too, but once again not sure.

I know this is a wall of text, but I cannot tell you enough how appreciative I am in advance for your informative answers.

Thanks a million,

Trenton

[PM_Academy]

Well, I'm super impatient so I spent the last two days trying to figure this one out:

Best Solution:

Canonicalize the four products not contingent on a city, and leave the rest alone.  There's no way to canonicalize a page forward(is that a term? should be.) and still have that page show up in Search Engines.  So I cannot standardize all the cities into one page, without losing the ability to search for those individual pages (which is worth more to us than having our link juice in 1 spot).

Thanks to everyone who took a look and tried to help.