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Thank You Tom!   This is a lot of information to digest - I will review and let you know if I have any additional questions - but I wanted to thank you for your prompt response!

I was wondering if anyone would be able to share some data structure/indexing best practices.   We have a site that has pages designed to display National/State/City level data - all pages have slight variations in the data and descriptions - but we're seeing google index some of the city level data for national level keywords.

the URL structure is www.mysite.com/Country/State/City/Topic.html

For example - if the query was "what is the price of beans?"  we're seeing Google pick up localized versions - i.e. mysite.com/US/CA/San_Francisco/price-of-beans.html - when it should be picking up mysite.com/US/price-of-beans.html

I've toyed with the idea of using the national level page as the canonical for the state/city pages - but I don't want to hurt state/city level keywords.

Because some of the pages have only slight variances - we are also seeing a lot of soft 404 errors - We're assuming that Google is seeing the pages as duplicates even though the content is different.

Any insight/suggestions are appreciated.

I was wondering if anyone would be able to share some data structure/indexing best practices.   We have a site that has pages designed to display National/State/City level data - all pages have slight variations in the data and descriptions - but we're seeing google index some of the city level data for national level keywords.

the URL structure is www.mysite.com/Country/State/City/Topic.html

For example - if the query was "what is the price of beans?"  we're seeing Google pick up localized versions - i.e. mysite.com/US/CA/San_Francisco/price-of-beans.html - when it should be picking up mysite.com/US/price-of-beans.html

I've toyed with the idea of using the national level page as the canonical for the state/city pages - but I don't want to hurt state/city level keywords.

Because some of the pages have only slight variances - we are also seeing a lot of soft 404 errors - We're assuming that Google is seeing the pages as duplicates even though the content is different.

Any insight/suggestions are appreciated.

Thank You Tom!   This is a lot of information to digest - I will review and let you know if I have any additional questions - but I wanted to thank you for your prompt response!