Thanks, Miriam.

Yes, you are right. I have already asked for help and a budget, but things are moving slowly, even with getting images and video content and it is, of course, frustrating, since I want to improve the results sooner.

Basically, I am dealing with old-school people who still don't get online marketing and look at it as a necessary "evil" so my hands are tied. I am making progress at convincing them, although at a turtle-like pace.

Thank you again.

Hi, Miriam

Thank you for the answer. We do serve the entire US.
I am working on re-creating the content on these pages (which is a total of about 30) to make it more unique. I don't see another solution at this time, since I don't have a team of bloggers at this time, just an external team who do the development and PPC.  The rest falls on my shoulders- including solving technical issues, optimization, link-building, social media, blogging, research for content/competition/trends in industry and online, reputation management, analytics, even graphics, new business projects, etc.- all while trying to educate the management and sell them on the changes that are beneficial for the company.

Due to the reasons mentioned above, what I am trying to do at this time is remove us from the danger zone, so I am going to change the content, as Chris said. The only other thing I can do is to re-direct some pages and then work on building links off-site, but this will take a while.

We are in the export (and a bit of import) business, any suggestions for this industry are greatly be appreciated.

Thank you, Chris

These are helpful suggestions. I am going to create unique content as you suggested- so this should help create unique content.  I will probably organize all of them under our main Locations page, where we also have an interactive map for our physical locations. Right now, these cities and states pages are buried within the site and not visible. 
Regarding the off-site links- I like your idea of getting links from local news stations. Any ideas of how I may be able to do that? I don't have anything newsworthy for those cities at this time.

Hi,

Our business has a few brick-and-mortar business locations, but it is servicing multiple big cities in the US, where we do not have a location, but we do business in though our independent agents (and we cannot use their locations).
I have inherited the website, which has duplicate content for all the locations (cities and states), and I am worried about possible penalties. Every major city and state in the US has been targeted so far, but it seems pretty spammy to me- duplicate content, pages for all major US cities, pages for all states, etc. This is a B2C services website, and we can service anyone in the US.

Example of pages:

domain.com/services/service-from-x-city 
and domain.com/services/service-from-x-state

The goal is to rank locally for all the cities we are targeting. What on-page optimization should I work on besides unique content for each one? Should I consolidate some pages, and if yes, what do you recommend?
What overall strategies should I follow so I do not lose the traffic for the targeted cities? 
Off-page, I am working on building local citations for these cities.

Thank you.