duplicate/similar site pages hurt, help, or not effect SEO?

[Andrew T]

My friend owns a service business and he services multiple cities and areas. He would like to have a separate "service area" page for each city he works in (a dozen or more) and wants them mostly the same content wise, but a different URL for each..

As in.
http://www.xyx.com/city1
http://www.xyz.com/city2
http://www.xyz.com/city3

Only real change in the page content would be the page <title>, the name of each city everywhere it's mentioned, and an embedded Google map of each city on it's respective page. He doesn't want to totally write new unique content for each city page when the services and info are pretty much the same.

Will this help, hurt, or not make much difference in regards to SEO?

[Shah]

I think this is not benefited policy.

[OgiSays:]

Hi,

Duplicate content is not good idea at all, but this organization of content as you mentioned is a good idea. I know that creating content is challenging task, but instead of creating all new content try with adding "About the city" part in all page (that will be different to all pages) and you can change the look of the page a little bit, sometimes enough to have some values. As much as you can the content, that is better. Also, beside text, you can add new image from the city for every page and achieve again different look and content.

Hope it helps,

[Beth]

No, this won't help... Google looks for unique content and if it spots duplicate content within a website it will choose just one of the pages to index.

Your friends website won't get penalized but I would recommend creating unique content for each page so all pages can be shown in the serps.

Hope this helps...

[Hal Smith]

This would only end up hurting SEO and maybe blacklisting you specially now with the new updates in Google algorithm and human checking in place you run the risk of completely loosing your websites credibility and ranking. Even before this technique didn't really help in any way and now it would definitely end up raising a red flag.

Hal Smith
URLdreamer Consultant