Change in site URL structure, One Big Site or Multiple Sites

[surfgatinho]

When I look in the SERPs for one of my niches I see that a couple of webmasters have created multiple small sites, i.e. one for every town. So instead of having "example.com/city1" they will have a website "city1-example.com". These are cross-linked and seem to do pretty well.

Now it could be that Google sees their sites as having better content - although to be honest a lot of the info is repeated.

That aside, I'm thinking of changing my site structure...

The first question is does google see URLs with a trailing slash as being a directory as opposed to a page. (or does it make difference) the reason I ask is I'm thinking of beginning by changing my city URLs to be like "example.com/city1/"

Once that is done I would move relevant content that exists in different site sections under these URLs. So for example "restaurants in City1" might currently reside at "example.com/restaurants/city1". This would be changed to "example.com/city1/restaurants".

I suppose the main question here is does Google see a discrete directory within a website as almost equivalent to a website? And does it care that much about URL structure or is the linking structure more important?

[phranque]

google reps have often stated that (in most cases, and insert your favorite weasel words here) linking is more important than url structure in the directory vs subdomain debate.
i think it would take much more effort to get similar results with separate domains.

there are additional, more important considerations here:

if you ever had a need to host these "sites" locally to a city, you definitely want to use separate hostnames for the "sites" - either subdomains or separate domains, if that works better for your application.
this way the subdomains may be hosted on different (local) servers, whereas a subdirectories cannot.

if your cities are in different countries, your situation might warrant using domains on the appropriate ccTLDs.

[surfgatinho]

Thanks for the reply (and the title edit - reads better now).

The small, city/town targeted sites I'm looking at look pretty low maintenance. A lot of shared content and heavy cross-linking.

So, I think changing the URL structure is probably not the way to go. So I guess that leaves the linking structure.

What do you think about making the city/town pages on my big site into "mini sites" via the linking structure? So, instead of having more general site-wide links to food, activities etc, I limit these mainly to the particular location. So instead of a main menu with: "Country food / Country activities / Country people" it becomes "City food / City activities / City people"

I think I know this makes sense but would just like a second opinion...
Thanks

[Nutterum]

One big site is always better than many small ones.

THERE IS ONE EXCEPTION!

If you have different content for different countries, then having different gTLD domains is better for ranking locally, while the hub site is facing the majority (say English for all of EU/USA with non-english languages going to their respective country domains). Also the gTLD should link more heavily to the hub site than the other way around.

Hope I helped.

P.S.

I want to give a real example. I had a competitor for one my sites that was ranking very high for a particular keyword phrase
because his exact match domain name and 9-year history gave big relevance in of itself even though the site was just a gateway to an e-commerce site. In any case, he was ranking n1 for the juiciest high traffic money phrase for the niche. What brought him down was his greed to dominate the other top 4 keywords by using the same tactics. Google sniffed them out and botched them. Same thing for your case as well, sooner or later the multitude of copy-paste websites will be deprecated by Google.