I need to emphasise the importance of unique text on pages so I will create exactly the same links pointing to a few pages as an experement:
- A regional page which has never ranked
- A page which used to rank but then lost it’s position
- A page which you write a unique paragraph for and add it at the bottom instead of the existing text
- A page which we leave the original text on
What will most likely happen, is that No3 will start to appear, but the others will not, however if you then add some unique text to those pages they will in time start to rank too.
I know it sounds like a lot of work to make them all unique, but with the recent updates, unique content is more important than ever. See this document from Google http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359