Is almost the same content on many pages considered a negative?

[pkKumar]

Suppose i have 20 pages, now these 20 pages have similar looking content, almost 90% same, with difference basically is of city or a country name only. Will this considered as negative or something that can force an action. What i experience is that these all pages did pretty well for starting 1-2 months, always on first page, but now from last 1 month or so there are nowhere.
Infact many other pages are nowhere, so one more question is whether these particular pages can cause action on the whole site.

[goodroi]

I find it interesting that a few days ago you were complaining that spam sites were outranking quality sites ( [webmasterworld.com...] ) and now you are asking why your pages with 90% identical content aren't performing well.

Maybe I am misunderstanding something.

[HuskyPup]

almost 90% same

The very nature of my widgets make my descriptions etc very, very similar however YahGooBing all manage to separate them individually thanks to my site architecture.

You need to ensure that each page is very obviously different and not just one long list of look-a-likes, I'm not saying yours is so get someone with fresh eyes to look at them.

[pkKumar]

Maybe I am misunderstanding something.

That is different topic altogether what i observe in a different niche.
This is with respect to one of my other site that required some pages to have similar looking content with respect to various cities. All the pages were coming in serp's till 1 month back but now they are not there along many other pages of the site. So the question is whether these pages can affect the overall keyword ranking of the site.

[netmeg]

I have a similar situation, but I found ways to make the pages different. It's a matter of percentages. If 10% of your pages are 90% similar, you might get away with it. If 70% of your pages are 90% similar, you're probably dead in the water.

[pkKumar]

If 10% of your pages are 90% similar, you might get away with it. If 70% of your pages are 90% similar, you're probably dead in the water.

Its even less than 10% comparing to total pages on the site.