Sites being penalized?

I have 52 state sites to go along with our www.schoolsintheusa.com website. The URL's are www.schoolsin(State).com for example www.schoolsincalifornia.com or www.schoolsintexas.com.

The state sites rank very poorly in the search engines, despite an average page rank of about 3-5. These sites won't even show up for their own URL keywords, ie. schools in california or schools in texas.

Could it be possible that these sites are being penalized by SE's for something?

Thanks, in advance.

Mwilliams

how close are the sites in terms of content? I mean if the only differences between the 50 sites are the states, then its probably getting flagged for duplicate content.

The content is fairly similar with some state specific facts. The biggest difference is that the state sites are only searching for schools in the specific states where the national site searches nationally.

Thanks for your help!

mwilliams

www.copyscape.com can find all your pages if you input just the one, so that's a big giveaway on dup content (although it's all yours). The tool www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php found your california and texas - for example - to be 80.6% similar.

Try to move some of the code around and add more state-specific content, and maybe things will get better.

But if this is only a "penalty" for having dup content, then you should really see at least one of your sites/pages rank well, with the others lagging far behind (or even being dropped). Also, the site ranking well should trade places with one of the others, every now and again. If you don't see this happening, it could be something else entirely (stiff competition for instance ;) )

Hello Mwilliams.
How heavily are they crosslinked? That could cause a penalty.

How long have they been around?

Each page on each site has a link, in a drop down box, to all the state sites. I'd say that's pretty heavily crosslinked!

They've been around for approximately a year and a half, why?

Thanks,

mwilliams