Looking to set up and rank 50 pages with similar content

This is no longer possible; at least not is a cookie-cutter way.

What you can do is build completely different pages that happen to talk also about similar keywords.

Lets say for example you site would be about "jobs" then you would have a page that talks about oil drilling jobs in Texas and another would be talking about fishing jobs in Maine.

Each page would contain a news section that would be updated on a weekly basis and maybe even a Facebook page dedicated to it and a special Twitter page.

Then each page would have contributors from the particular area that write on a regular basis (once a month or so).

So, basically you would build little community portals around your keywords for each state.

Hi Tom,

Great question! You've come up with a scenario which presents us with a legitimate use for article spinning (granted, one of the very few).

I've done this same exercise in the past (for regional variations with minor content variations per region).

I've used one of the popular spinning tools to do this. I create the original and add all of the necessary spin code. I spend a good couple of hours on this stage. I change whole sentences and paragraphs and create nested sentences/paragraphs with spin variants and check to make sure everything reads well. I then insert a series of characters like ##### in the spot where I want the State names to go.
Now I spin the 50 copies that I need. Then I take each copy and do a 'find and replace' on the ###### and insert the specific State name. Then, I manually edit each article to add/remove the specific and non generic information that belongs to each State.
The whole process takes a few hours but it's quicker than the alternative which would take me a couple days.

I proof everything to make sure it reads well. The result is 50 well written pieces of content, each customized and sufficiently different from the rest to warrant inclusion in the Google index.
Again, this is one of the few legitimate uses for spinning software. It gets my back up when people write about spinning software as if it is only used by spammers.

Cheers

One of my major sites had this problem. I sucked it up and wrote 70-ish different articles myself (I didn't trust an article writer to not make them too similar) over a few weekends.

Now that site pulls in good money and I'm glad I spent the extra time making it completely unique content.