Does it make sense to create a new sub-site?

[makke]

Hello,

I have a <widget> website of a region and I would like to know if it would improve my SEO if I create a new website for a subregion.
For example my site could be www.country.com with various subregions (country.com/region1, country.com/region2,...) But 80% of my <widgets> are in Region2 (www.country.com/region2/widget1...).

To get better results I want to make a separate website www.region2.com. The list of widgets would also still be visible on www.country.com but the link there would not be anymore country.com/region2/widget1 but region2.com/widget1.

I hope I explained it a bit clear. Does this makes sense, is there a risk of duplicate content, bad links,...?

Thank you for your comments on this.

[edited by: aakk9999 at 5:27 pm (utc) on Dec 3, 2013]
[edit reason] Exemplified [/edit]

[aakk9999]

Hi makke and welcome to WebmasterWorld!

Sometimes it may be an advantage to create a niche site focusing on the specific region. The question you need to answer is: can this new niche site stand on its own?

The second question is: what will this do to your current site. The new site will start from zero and will have to build its way up in Google trust and ranking. The current site may (or may not) already rank on Google for this niche.

You said that the existing site will list your widgets, but when the link is clicked, a visitor would be taken to the new niche site to display widget details. This means that the existing site will lose 80% of the widget details pages, which will be transferred to the new niche region site.

Whilst longer term you want your new niche site to rank for niche widgets, short term you will almost certainly experience drop in ranking of the main site for niche widgets, but the new niche site will not yet be ranking for these terms. It is also possible that the main site loses ranking for other region widgets when the widgets from the main region are transferred to niche site, since the number of widgets on the site will drop.

As you can see, there are many possible outcomes and you need to weight carefully.

[makke]

Thank you very much for you reply. The reason I'm thinking about a new separate niche site is because I'm not scoring at all for the current main.com/niche (3rd page on google but with an outdated URL, 10th page on Bing). So I guess I have not so much to lose.

If I create the new niche site, do you think it would be better to also keep the original main.com/niche links? Wouldn't that be harmful regarding duplicate content? I also advertise on bigger portals (who score better on the search engines) with the same content.

[edited by: aakk9999 at 2:19 pm (utc) on Dec 6, 2013]

[aakk9999]

If I create the new niche site, do you think it would be better to also keep the original main.com/niche links?

I presume you here mean "pages" and not "links"? I.e. the same content would exist in both, the new site and the old one?

If this is the case, then this is not a good idea. If you decide to create a new site, then you should either create a new unique (and value added) content and link from the old site to the new site, or move the content from the old site to the new site and set up the 301 redirects.

It is also not wise to use the same content you publish on your site on bigger portals where you advertise - unless you are using just a small excerpts.

[adder]

can this new niche site stand on its own?

a very good point

3rd page on google but with an outdated URL, 10th page on Bing

It's much easier to climb to page one from the 3rd page than it is to climb to page one from nowhere with a new site.