Directories for city and county = duplicate content = trouble?

[dibbern2]

I have a geographical directory in a specialty area that uses cities as the organizing factor; i.e., "rutabagas in denver", "rutabagas in colorado springs"

I have learned, however, that my audience frequently searches by county, and so I am building pages that offer "rutabagas in xyz county".

Since the data in the county directories will duplicate listings already available in the city directories, I am wondering if I am asking for trouble. The questionable factor is that the content will be "different" in that the mix county-wise is never exactly presented in any city directory... more a conglomeration of several city directories.

Do you think I should "noindex" the new county directories? Or just not worry?

Thanks.

[edited by: tedster at 3:56 am (utc) on April 8, 2009]

[tedster]

I'd make sure that the county pages have "county name" in the title, meta description and H1 elements. Treat the city name the same way. Next, be ruthless in eliminating all potential canonical url issues [webmasterworld.com].

Then let Google sort it out from there. I would not expect trouble if you follow that protocol. At most you would have two content areas being truly duplicate, in the case where the county-level data is exactly the same as the city-level. Sometimes a city is its own county, and in that case it doesn't really matter if one of those urls gets filtered out of a particular SERP.

Remember, a true "duplicate content penalty" is a rare beast - it's not very likely to hit a technically sound, non-spammy website. See Duplicate content Demystified [webmasterworld.com] for more.