Duplicate Content Question

Concernin 50 states that all have one of these...

[youfoundjake]

Lets say I want to post the head office of a store for each state, so that I have 50 pages of address's for the headquarters. Will google and the other major search engines see these 50 pages as duplicate entries and therefor not cache all of them or run the risk of them all being supplemental? What amount of text does one have to put into a page in order for it to not be considered duplicate or supplemental. Keeping in mind that each page in and of itself is a necessary page as it provides contact information. The problem is there is only so many ways that you can talk about the address of the headquarters, certainly not 50 different ways. If I was to obfuscate, isn't that just fluffing the page? This is posing a serious dilema for me as the fear of duplicate pages and supplemental results.
Any one have any thoughs on this?

[edited by: engine at 10:57 am (utc) on July 18, 2006]

[engine]

I wonder if you're looking at it from the wrong angle.

Why have 50 pages for each state?

Why not have just one page with the HQs address?

[vite_rts]

I have an interest in this, and its because in my tiny website, I want to have a page dedicated to "capturing " interest in lets say each city that the site covers.

The giant in my sector, a very well known giant, actually has a sub domain for each city, an those sub domains wreak havoc in the serps,

I canna afford to register som many sub domains an in many case , a page dedicated to each city, i've read elsewhere that this is okay.

My question, if I may , is does anyone know by what percentage the pages have to be different?

The sub domains of my friendly neighbourhood giant are virtually identical, doesn't prevent them from driving everyone else out from 40% of a "google", yes "google" search, using up to 10 different keyword phrases

[jpavery]

"I cannot afford so many sub domains an in many case..."
Does your host charge for subdomains? If you had your own server they would all be free.

[vite_rts]

Sadly, I cannot have my own server just yet, in any case, I think sub domains have to be registered with an authority, an go on name servers etc etc, actually tis not a lotta money, but I really would like to see some money coming in before I splash out again,,

[Halfdeck]

If you don't see yourself writing at least 200 words of unique text per state, put everything on one page.

[youfoundjake]

I have thought about making a form that will generate each state to the user's need, but concerning my niche.. there are certain states that perform higher then others. The other side of this would be the adwords target towards geolocations. That way I can get more accurate traffic going to the pages that I want them to and running reports and optimizing my budget.
As far as 200 words of text...I think I can manage that... maybe give a little history of when the headquarters was built and who the current top dog is at the time. Maybe offer some information on what kind of specials they are offering at the time. If this is the case, and it prevents duplicate content penalities and supplemental results, then I can do this.
Danke

[netmeg]

I have a site that lists events specific to cities in a state. It's a dynamic site; there's really only two HTML pages, but every city/page is listed in Google separately (right now there's just under 500 pages) Each page has unique content, and the title is generated from the database as well, so that is unique as well. So yes, it can be done.

[youfoundjake]

Netmeg, are any of those pages showing as supplementals?

[Philosopher]

vite_rts, just so you know, generally subdomains can be set up quite easily and in most cases free. Most hosting providers will allow you to create a certain number of subdomains free with your hosting plans. Some hosts allow an unlimited number of subdomains.

Check with your host. It is very likely it won't cost you a thing and you won't have to deal with nameservers etc. as they handle all that.

[LifeinAsia]

It is very likely it won't cost you a thing and you won't have to deal with nameservers etc. as they handle all that.

I agree- it takes very little work to setup a wildcard DNS entry so that all subdomains resove to your server. So if your hosting company wants to charge you more than a token amount, definitely move to a new company.

Depending on your web server, setting up each subdomain may take a little bit of busy work, but it's certainly not rocket science. Alternatively, you can use a scripting langauge or other tools to dynamically handle the subdomains without having to add to the server configuration for each subdomain.

[netmeg]

Netmeg, are any of those pages showing as supplementals?

Yep - but actually the site command shows way more pages than I actually have. As far as I can tell, 420 pages out of a possible 474 are normal (as of this morning), the rest are either supplemental or filtered, or both. I can live with that.