Duplicating relevant category content in subcategories. Good or bad for google ranking?

[lcourse]

In a travel related page I have city categories with city related information. 
Would you recommend for or against duplicating some relevant city related in subcategory pages.

For visitor it would be useful and google should have more context about the topic of our page.
But my main concern is how this may be perceived by google and especially whether it may make it more likely being penalized for thin content. We already were hit end of june by panda/phantom and we are working on adding also more unique content, but this would be something that we could do additionally and basically instantaneously. Just do not want to make things worse.

[lcourse]

Thanks a lot Laura, so I guess we would not need to be too concerned.

[LauraSultan]

As with many SEO questions, the answer here is "It depends." What type of content is duplicated on the city pages? How much unique content is there in addition to the duplicated content?

Having the same content on unique city pages is not necessarily a problem. Google will serve up the page that is most relevant to the search query and will filter out the rest. However, if all of the content is the same across all of these pages, the overall site would be considered lower quality.  The key is to balance any duplicated content with additional unique content that provides value for the site visitor.