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The short answer is yes, but there are some caveats.

It depends on what you mean by the word "penalty". If you had a manual penalty (Google sent you a message through Google Webmaster Tools), then the best answer is usually to remove the offensive links, submit a reconsideration request, and replace those links with good ones. If, on the other hand, you had a drastic drop in rank due to an algorithm update, removing links will do nothing for you. Based on what you're saying (and correct me if I'm wrong), this sounds like what is happening with you.

In that scenario, the links that got you the ranking for "schrader valve" were most likely devalued and don't count against you. They're just not helping you anymore either. Your time would be best invested into earning stronger links.

Let me know if I misunderstood your question...

I think this is the answer I was looking for... Yeah,  GWT already has a bunch of our parameters added, and hasn't had a problem with this one. It's not showing these pages as duplicate like SEOMoz does.

Thanks guys!

My on page reports are showing a good number of duplicate title tags, but they are all because of a url tracking parameter that tells us which link the visitor clicked on. For example, http://www.example.com/example-product.htm?ref=navside and http://www.example.com/example-product.htm are the same page, but are treated as to different urls in SEOMoz. This is creating "fake" number of duplicate page titles in my reports.

This has not been a problem with Google, but SEOMoz is treating it like this and it's confusing my data. Is there a way to specify this as a url parameter in the Moz software?

Or does anybody have another suggestion? Should I specify this in GWT and BWT?

We are setting up landing pages on our site that will cater to specific cities, in an effort to be more relevant to the users in those cities and also capture more localized traffic. These regional pages will each have a unique paragraph at the top, but below that is a sentence or two about each product line that would be difficult to rewrite with quality more than 10 - 15 times.

Would the paragraph at the top of the page be enough unique content (about 4-5 sentences)? Obviously the duplicate content wouldn't be to my advantage, but is it really necessary to rewrite the other sentences about the product lines?

What's the most efficient method to complete this project in a whitehat fashion?