I own and have been working on a web site called www.mustangexclusives.com which allows Ford Mustang enthusiasts to find local car shows and car clubs to create event pages on our site with information about those events. We then send that information to subscribers and site visitors. A couple questions: First of all, I have several cities in the u.s. to choose from with domains such as /desmoinesia or /dallastx . However depending upon where event promoters choose to promote events to, the same content could show up under multiple cities. Is this okay? Secondly, car clubs and event promoters are free to include whatever information they want about their car show on their event page. Often, they're just taking and copying information from their own club websites and its hard for me to keep track, let alone control them. Is this bad and if so what can I do to help? Lastly, beyond those issues how does the site look SEO wise beyond a lack of content.
I seen many such sites as yours, I don't think that should harm you, plus it doesn't sound like you have much choice, you can't tell them to play with words before pasting them on your site. Install a sitemap Connect to webmaster tools install your analytics code do all of your in page SEO make sure content goes dynamically inside the meta tags of description, not full content lets say first paragraph. Focus on link backs, if you can get people to place a button that links to you, that would be more friendly to SE. I don't know of anything else to tell you, but I do wish you good luck and a better advice from a better optimist.
Just use the canonical tag to point all duplicate pages to one unified page about the event. It doesn't mean those other pages won't show up, but it will let the search engines know that all those pages are essentially about the same thing. If content of this type will constitute the majority of your website's content, it may had an adverse effect on your rankings. Well, this is in theory. In reality though Google doesn't check sites for duplicate content, but has an algorithm to identify sites that provide poor user experience (the Panda filter). These often happen to be content scraper sites, but it doesn't mean that Google is presently actively identifying and penalizing such sites.