Duplicate content issue
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I have recently built a site that has a main page intended to rank for national coverage. This site also has a number of pages targeted at local searches, these pages are slight variations of each other with town specific keywords. Does anyone know if google will see this as spam and quarantine my site from ranking? Thanks
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You want to rank for local searches right? Now the question is do you have physical presence in those places? If not, by making city specific pages just to get rank for will definitely invite penalty sooner or later. Think about the customers first and not the search engines.
_Now, if you do have branches in those cities, you can create Google Local listing, can have separate landing pages for them given the fact that those pages say something unique about the business etc. Do not add rehash content that no one is going to add. Focus on adding value to users’ experience. _
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Creating a site with multiple landing pages targeted to different regions is not new, therefore Google has made updates to try attempt to stop sites with low quality from capitalizing on localized keywords (miami keyword, tuscon x, san diego x, etc) where x is your main keyword.
What this means is that you need to do more than simply duplicate your pages and mix up the keywords, replace the local terms and create new URLs and titles/descriptions. What you should do is create completely unique copy, dynanic content and/or user engagement, local citations will help each landing page, and make sure to get local backlinks to each landing page.
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While I certainly don't want to pretend to be able to predict anything Google might do, to me, the fact that you are thinking about this as being a potential problem should be enough to make you consider some options. Depending on how many pages you have, it may not be that difficult to get really truly original content produced for those other pages.
Will Google choose not to index you? I have no idea.
My guess is that you get indexed, but may not rank very high if the content is substantially similar on all of those pages. You might get stuck in the proverbial "sandbox." (ranked so low that no one can find you).
My gut says, if you have to ask "is this duplicate content?" It probably is, so make it unique.
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