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It is still possible it isn't a penalty from one of the major algorithms and you may be able to solve this by creating a strong internal linking strategy. It helps to formulate one if you use something like MindNode to create an overview of the site and then you can drill in on the pages in questions. It is possible that a noindex would cure this, but it all depends because even though you add a noindex tag to a page, Google can still read the page and apply the penalty. All it means is that the page won't be indexed. However, if you are relaunching everything very soon, you might be as well to sit tight and not do anything too rash for a short-term solution. -Andy

This feels like looking for permission to take a short cut and I personally cannot justify that. I would highly recommend to take the time to make the pages correctly and not even worry about duplicate content or Panda. None of use can tell you if it will "work" or if it'll be seen as duplicate content or when it'll be hit by panda, but if it's auto-generated, I can promise it'll be hit at some point. However, the worst you can do is test it. Take the top 10% of make/model deal pages and create them how you want. Do it like you're talking and see how they perform. I'm not talking a few weeks, I mean a few months. All the while, be developing the content for some of those pages. This way, if it works and people like the pages, they are relevant produced the way you want to do it now, the short way, then you can produce the other pages that way. At that point however, your top make/model pages will have unique content that you can put up. So a few months later, you'll have 10% of your deals pages with unique content and the rest automated. Then start working on the next top 10%. Keep going until they are all done.

Great - thanks Keri & mathamatix. I'll ping over an email to help@ now. JP