Will google punish us for using formulaic keyword-rich content on different pages on our site?

[Storitz]

We have 100 to 150 words of SEO text per page on www.storitz.com.  Our challenge is that we are a storage property aggregator with hundreds of metros.  We have to distinguish each city with relevant and umique text.

If we use a modular approach where we mix and match pre-written (by us) content, demographic and location oriented text in an attempt to create relevant and unique text for multiple (hundreds) of pages on our site, will we be devalued by Google?

[KrisRoadruck]

hmm. Tough call. Depends on the authority of your domain honestly. I've seen absolute garbage + duplication rank given the right link profile. That being said you might do better to pull in some local data with APIs and scrapers and mash it up to bring extra content to the page that is more localized. Then find a way to incentivize UGC for further diversification.

[Storitz]

Thanks! We actually already have unique local content about each metro., but we are still not getting pagerank, in part because we have only local and shopping-data driven results on our pages. We're now writing how-to content (how to do RV Storage, how to pack your house for putting it into storage, how to choose a storage property that fits your needs, etc.) on our site, and then linking to it with keyword anchor text phrases from our metro-page paragraphs.  Question is, will we be penalized for mentioning and linking to the same how-to content on multiple metro pages?

[KrisRoadruck]

I think you may be misunderstanding what PageRank is. But moving past that for a moment. No, interlinking within your own site is not going to hurt you, generally speaking. However this is assuming all the pages reside on the same subdomain (www for example).

If you have every metro on a subdomain e.g. "seattle.yoursite.com" and interlink all of those... THAT could create a problem.

Recommend you stick with:

www.yoursite.com/state/metro/ instead.

[Dan-Petrovic]

Agreed. Domain authority will play a significant role and more authoritative site may get away with it easier than a small one. I speak from what I have seen (not a speculation).