I am trying to better understand solving the duplicate content issues highlighted in your recent crawl report of our site - www.thehomesites.com.

[urahul]

Below are some of the urls highlighted as having duplicate content - 
http://www.thehomesites.com/zip_details/76105 
http://www.thehomesites.com/zip_details/44135 
http://www.thehomesites.com/zip_details/75227 
http://www.thehomesites.com/zip_details/94501

These are neighborhood reports generated for 4 different zip codes. We use a standard template to create these reports. What are some of the steps we can take to avoid these pages being categorized as duplicate content?

[urahul]

Thanks for the suggestions hectormainar.

[Stramark]

If you want to rank with unique pages for each zipcode you will have to do what hectormainar said.

you could make the choice of using a canonical to refer to a page of a larger/more general postal code so you do not create as much duplicate content.

[hectormainar]

Basically every text into your pages is the same, except some small numbers which in proportion represent a really small amount of text, and some meta tags.

You should make a mix between the standard template and some kind of database information for each neighbourhood. For example, inserting a small description of the area, or visitor comments. If you look for something more automatic than a description, maybe you could query some kind of webservice which could allow you to show the most important streets in the district: that would create some different text without manual work for every page.

The only way of avoiding that duplicate content is to in fact have different content :(.