country subdomains and subsubdomains

how to maximize SEO and not confuse measurement with subdomains

[johoney]

We are planning and site that has country subdomains. Both the base domain (example.com) and country domains will have member-id (eg. fr.example.com/member-id)

We also want to have partnerships so that each partner would have their own discrete site section and member-id. My question is how to structure this best in terms of SEO as well as to not confuse measurement. To illustrate:

base site: example.com
base site with member id: example.com/memberid
country site: fr.example.com
country site with member id: fr.example.com/memberid

Here's the tricky part:

partner.cafe.com/memberid - this would reduce the SEO benefit to the base domain but possibly facilitate easier measurement
example.partner.com/memberid - ditto
example.com/partner-id/memberid - this might confuse measurement but be good for SEO

Any thoughts?

[Quadrille]

This does not directly answer your question, but the approach you suggest is unlikely to be the best way forward.

Many country searches will favour sites with either local hosting or a local tld (or both).

Your proposal would satisfy neither of these, and would also risk duplicate content issues.

It looks from your text as if this subdivision is being done for your administrative convenience, rather than user convenience or even SEO.

For maximum SEO benefit one domain with folders will still trump subdomains, virtually every time - For most purposes (though things are changing), subdomains are treated as separate domains, therefore dividing your SEO benefit among many domains.

Why not www.example.com/memberid/ ? - Your database knows what country the member is from, the URL should not need to include that information.

[edited by: Quadrille at 10:19 am (utc) on April 22, 2008]