Building a Yellow Page empire

one site vs. multiple sites

[TahlK]

I run a very successful national yellow page site right now and am looking to take my business to the next level. Most of my traffic comes from SE's right now and I have been extremely succesful in getting ranked highly for keyword + local modifier searches in the major SEs. As most of us know, for any particular search on the major SE's, one site can only occupy 2 slots. therefore, I want to build 1000's of smaller niche yellow page sites to take advantage of all positions I can get (not spam or duplicate content, I would manipulate it to be different each time).

My question is this: From an SEO standpoint, what is the most beneficial:
Ond domain for each keyword vs. one directory domain with subdomains for each keyword.

if one directory, then individual IP addresses for each subdomain?

The whole focus of this excercise is to focus more on the small cities (i.e. encino, ca) within the larger metropolitan areas (i.e. los angeles, ca)

Any advice is appreciated.

Thanks

[jeremy goodrich]

My recommendation would be to take the larger site, develop the brand, and then "go local" with that one by partnering with people that are on the ground in that region. I've seen PR (not the Google kind) spread things farther, faster, and generally as well or better than the best laid search strategy.

That being said...I'd go with multiple IP's, domains, hosting, whois, and make sure that you vary the IP address you call to the site with, don't install search engine toolbars...um, etc, etc. Even if the plan is to 'unique' each domain, trust me, one large site has economies of scale that do far better in the SERPs that multiple smaller sites.

Hope that helps.