Multiple listing directory pages pointing back to the same local business profile

[All-About-Labor]

I've been tuning my SEO pages to cover cities, states, and metro areas for local businesses we have. I'm wondering if the same business showing up on multiple pages, because they can actually go out and service that area, has a negative impact on rankings. Does multiple pages on your site, pointing to the same content, hurt or help the ranking of either page?

[MiriamEllis]

Good for you for tuning up your pages! You might also like to check out this article on the topic of city landing pages: http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide

Hope it helps!

[All-About-Labor]

Thank you! This also answers some other questions I had related to duplicate content.

[gazzerman1]

I took a look at your site and I see some issues with what your doing.

John Mueller at Google has confirmed on many occasions there is no duplicate penalty issues and I myself have a business that has a similar issue where geo locations overlap for services/content.

However what you do not want to do is create pages to try and rank them before you have content for them. I noticed all your state page are indexed but with the same message at the top with no content. This is a bad signal to the Panda Algorithm and will show thin non quality content that will affect the entire site. Noindex the pages you have no content for or its going to hurt you. Trust me I have been there on multiple sites.

Once you have done that Google will try to work out what page is best to show out of your duplicate content pages, so the best thing you can do is try to make each page unique with some additional information, maybe about the area or something, this will aid in those pages being ranked for the terms intended.