Duplicate Content Penalty

[PartyEnt]

Hello, I have several websites targeting hundreds of cities throughout the US for customers wanting to hire entertainment. Customers hire us for birthday/bachelor/bachelorette parties. The content is duplicated. In the real world a customer in Dallas, Tx looking at the Dallas page does not care if the content is the same as the Chicago page. All they care about is making sure grandma has a great time on her 80th birthday.

I have read about this for 17 years and never knew what to do. AI says they are looked at as doorway pages with thin content. I can rewrite them with AI, but then I read Google frowns up that. They think it is a way to manipulate the search. If I had one page that said we service hundreds/thousands of cities, it will not show up in the search and if it did they would get confused. People want to know you can help them in their city. We are the best in our industry, but people have to see us to know it.

I have spoken to many SEO'S about this through the years. From what I see there is not a duplicate content penalty. It seems that Google makes it harder to rank for the competitive cities if you do not have unique content for that city.

Would love to hear opinions and thoughts on this.

Thank you,

Caria

 

[ElizabethRule]

In my experience, Google does not take action on a site for duplicate or thin, similar content. This does not mean it cannot happen, but it is super rare. The main reason thin, crappy content ranks is when Google has nothing better to rank, so that content gets top positions for low-competition keywords. The upside is that those pages are typically easy to outrank with quality content.