norwegianguy - 1:17 am on Mar 28, 2006 (gmt 0)

I recently had to make similar, but not identical decision when initializing a city travel guide. My choice was between subdomains and subdirectories. Should I choose town.mybrand.com or www.mybrand.com/town? Using subdomains has some advantages: Presenting content pages higher in the directory structure (town.mybrand.com/restaurants rather than www.mybrand.com/town/restaurants) is good for indexing. Also, several subdomains equals several sites, thus opening the possibility of having multiple pages in the same SERP. Taking this into consideration, and not having time to do a lot of research on the topic, I went for the subdomain option, town.mybrand.com. One town is ready, and after only 2 weeks live the on-topic Adsense ads (hotels in town) pay more than any of my 5+ other sites.

The many-websites approach relies heavily on how many main sections you have, and how much content each section will contain. My city guide has about 50 content pages per city, and will cover about 5-10 cities. If I had 50 cities and 1 page per city, I would definitely use the subdirectory approach, not the many-websites approach.