Regional subdomains and duplicate content

[play75010]

Hello. (checked the FAQ but couldn't find an answer on this)

I run a website which is for the whole of France. Alas, it is mostly used in Paris. I thought that with some help from search engines and a good title/meta description, I could increase visibility in other parts of France.

So I was thinking about using subdomains and keeping my current website as the main source of data.

www.example.com - current website
toulouse.example.com - only displays people/events related to Toulouse
paris.example.com - only displays people/events related to Paris

Trouble is that an event or a profile seen on the Toulouse website is going to have exactly the same content as the one on the main website (www).

So, basically, I want the subdomains to be subsets of the "www." website. The www website site's <title> is "<main keyword> in France", the toulouse subdomain will be "<main keyword> in Toulouse".

Do you think this is going to deteriorate my traffic and have the reverse effect I'm hoping for ? Is there a better strategy than subdomains for this ?

PS: I don't think it is a good strategy for me to use subfolders since a person's profile could move from one city to another.

As a recap :

www.example.com - contains all events/people in France (title = "<keyword> in France")
paris.example.com - contains a subset of people and events living in Paris (title>= "keyword in Paris")
www.example.com/John - John's profile (John lives in Toulouse) (title = "John's profile, Toulouse)
toulouse.example.com/John - John's profile (<title> = "John's profile, Toulouse)
paris.mywebsite.com/John - ERROR, John's profile doesn't exist in Paris.

[edited by: tedster at 8:05 am (utc) on Feb 27, 2010]
[edit reason] make descriptions more generic [/edit]

[tedster]

Welcome to the forums!

So, basically, I want the subdomains to be subsets of the "www." website

This will be your first challenge. Subdomains are technically called "hostnames" - and even "www" is a hostname. So, from a technical, URL standpoint subdomains are not subsets of the "www" domain - they are each relatively stand alone websites.

So, for your approach to work, you will probably need to work on getting backlinks to each subdomain, or else you will still find that "www" URL is the one that will rank.

If you include a city or region in a search query (such as site:example.com Toulouse) do those profiles within the appropriate geographical area currently show up in the results?

[play75010]

Hello Tedster and thank you for your quick reply and editing.

The search "site:example.com Toulouse" comes up with appropriate results.

What I wanted to do was to offer users on the "www" site a list of all the subdomains available "toulouse.example.com", "paris.example.com" so that users would start using these instead of "www.example.com" but you're right, I guess people who know the website will still be using "example" in google to find my website.

As for people who don't know my website, I still think that offering their city's name in the hostname would be a pretty good optimization. But once again, you're right, I would need backlinks for all my subdomains.

There is a similar website in France (let's call it "otherexample.com") which is the main website and has nothing on it apart from a map of France which links to toulouse.otherexample.com, paris.otherexample.com, etc. but has different users/events on each subdomain. I can't afford doing that at the moment since my website is not as big as otherexample.

I guess I could give it a try on just one city and see the results, risking duplicate contents but on a small scale.

I would be very interested to know if people have tried this kind of configuration and if it has proven to lead to a better regional search.

Thank you.

[tedster]

An added observation - if you've got the content, then location-based subdomains certainly could work. Craigslist is a major example of that kind of success. However, they do not duplicate subdomain content on a central website.

[TheMadScientist]

This might be a good place to try a rel="canonical" 'tag' and setting it to the subdomain on one section of the main domain to see what happens with it... It's actually a situation where I think a canonical tag might work better for both visitors and the site than a 301 would, but it's not something I've tried, so implement at your own risk. ;)

And, as tedster said...
Welcome to WebmasterWorld!