Site with Multiple Cities

[Uncas]

Hi All,

I am running a site that has multiple cities

Ex:
http://www.example.com/newyork
http://www.example.com/boston

I have news section that is not specific to the city. Initially I created specific directories for each city

http://www.example.com/newyork/news
http://www.example.com/boston/news

But because most of the content is the same google considered those pages as same content and didn't index them.

Later I changed the links to http://www.example.com/news
Because I am checking which page the visitor entering to the site.. i have no issues driving the content within the page for a specific city...

But because google goes to this url with out going thru my entry page..It has problem finding the session for the city and it is erroring out..

I hope this wasn't confusing..

Any ideas?
Thanks

[tedster]

The practicality of my suggestion depends on how many cities you are covering, but I would consider a sort of news landing page that you serve for that url - one with links to all the possible cities. If any url doesn't have stable content for a bot, then it will have trouble being indexed. And if that url is a "gateway" to many other urls, then your current set-up is causing you problems.