Can I use duplicate content in different US cities without hurting SEO?

[MJTrevens]

So, I have major concerns with this plan.

My company has hundreds of facilities located all over the country. Each facility has it's own website. We have a third party company working to build a content strategy for us. What they came up with is to create a bank of content specific to each service line. If/when any facility offers that service, they then upload the content for that service line to that facility website. So in theory, you might have 10-12 websites all in different cities, with the same content for a service.

They claim "Google is smart, it knows its content all from the same company, and because it's in different local markets, it will still rank."

My contention is that duplicate content is duplicate content, and unless it is "localize" it, Google is going to prioritize one page of it and the rest will get very little exposure in the rankings no matter where you are. I could be wrong, but I want to be sure we aren't shooting ourselves in the foot with this strategy, because it is a major major undertaking and too important to go off in the wrong direction.

SEO Experts, your help is genuinely appreciated!

[Roman-Delcarmen]

While not appealing, you should rewrite all the content to be 100% unique, if it is privacy policy, tos, etc, you can no index those to reduce duplication. Otherwise, your options are limited. I realize that the products/ services will be similar in nature, but writing them in a different way to reduce the significantly similar content.

Alternatively, you can do a cross domain canonical tag, this tells Google that this content is duplicated intentionally on the other URL.

Here are a few articles about that:

https://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content

https://blog.kissmetrics.com/myths-about-duplicate-content/

https://yoast.com/rel-canonical/

http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/56326/canonical-urls-with-multiple-domains

Next, focus on building local links to the individual city pages, to further differentiate the cities and the intent. Also, using the schema.org for 'local business' on each versions of the URL's. And, again I will say this is not an ideal situation and the best case scenario would be to add that content on ONE domain just with different location pages, within a subdirectory format.

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[MJTrevens]

Thanks for the response Roman. Totally agree with you on this, but if you canonical all but one of the pages, then those pages will be dropped from the Google index right? Google will almost always display the original version regardless of location. And therefore those pages will not reap an organic traffic. That pretty much puts us back at the starting point.

I guess to simplify the question. If we use duplicate content on several sites various locations, is there any way we can get all those pages to rank in their respective markets?

[MiriamEllis]

Yes, unfortunately, what the agency is suggesting is like a recipe from a duplicate content cookbook. They are trying to offer a shortcut to doing the actual work that should be involved in publishing hundreds of websites.

Has the business ever considered consolidating everything into a single brand with a single site? That way, they could have 1 page for each city and 1 page for each service, redirecting all the old sites to the new one, and never having to worry again about creating content for hundreds of microsites.