With the examples that you guys are mentioning, it basically boils down to this- if you build in enough variation, you'll probably do okay.
This is an area of search engine work where pretty much everyone is in the dark. Nobody knows exactly how googles similarity algos work; and, they are apparently slightly changed on a regular basis.
How much variation do you need? How different do the pages have to be? Nobody knows- but it's not that much.
But, to get the best advantage in the serps, to get the best chance of being in the top 40, pretty much everyone agrees the more unique text your pages have, the better.
Linklists and TGPs are packed with "similar" descriptions, similar lines of text, but they do fairly well in getting top positions.
Just changing the filenames and directory names is not good- thats quite easy to filter for, pages with identical checksums except for the easily changed filenames, spam algos have been keying on those for years now.
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