How to handle page content that are considered duplicates by crawlers

Hello friends

I have a very big site with more than 100K links, i scanned my site using seomoz and it gives me 1000's of duplicate content error and i'm stuck how to fix that. Can any one point me to correct solutions for following issue? How do i fix this?

Issue1:
Urls -
www.sitename.com/alabama
www.sitename.com/alaska
... all 50 states

For these pages the content is different by state name only, is this considered duplicate. Even meta tags content is different.
On page content Ex:
alabama page - abc xyz ahnd alabama xncn askdj asjdh alabama.
alaska page - abc xyz ahnd alaska xncn askdj asjdh alaska.


Issue2:
Search Listing [shows list of schools in the city specified in url]:
www.sitename/alaska/city1-schools/
www.sitename/alaska/city2-schools/

some cities are close by so many listings overlap for them and show same schools for these cities search but in different order sorted by distance on page and this is also considered as duplicate but i think this is not.

Thanks

Issue 1 is a big problem because this kind of content is a big no-no. It just doesn't work and is super easy to detect just by breaking the text down into short strings and comparing for uniqueness. The only answer is to put proper unique content of some kind on each page. Basically you should have just planned your site better from the outset.

Issue 2 is less of an issue and can be further alleviated by adding extra unique content to each page, to reduce the amount of dupe text on each page.

Is this thread still alive? I've been encountering the same problem actually.

What is the best thing to do here?
no-follow, no-index robot tags?
redirects?
or remove all the pages with similar content?

OP I think your probably having the same issue as backpage. com they have the same concept with multiple cities, yet they are ranking very highly on some very competitive keywords, research how they are doing it and apply it to your site.

Content is most important after penguin use unique and quality content and you'r issues will be solved.

Maybe you can use the canonical URL tags.. to be honest I'm not entirely sure how they work, but I know that it tells Google that Page XYZ is the main page and any duplicate pages should not be take into account... wouldn't mind a bit of clarification there myself to be honest.

Backpage is a directory. That's just like craiglist! I won't be surprised. No wonder they rank high.

Really confused at the moment, what specific steps would be convenient in this issue.

GiorgioB said:

Maybe you can use the canonical URL tags.. to be honest I'm not entirely sure how they work, but I know that it tells Google that Page XYZ is the main page and any duplicate pages should not be take into account... wouldn't mind a bit of clarification there myself to be honest.

Click to expand...

Yes, the answer is canonical tags. Look up on google how to use them but here is the theory behind them--

You gotta first find out similar content on your site/blog. You have to decide which you want to define as 'original' and which one as 'seconary'. This is the best way you can tell search engines that you are aware about dupe content on your domains and you are tagging that using the canonical tags.