Subdomains from and SEO perspective

[Yakamo]

First order a shout out to everyone, first post :)

New to SEO, studying hard.

My team and I are designing a website that will be catering to cities all across Canada. Each city will have a custom page and we were thinking about using subdomains for each city same sort of format Kijiji uses. For example we would have
calgary.ourwebsite.ca vs. ourwebsite.ca/calgary
edmonton.ourwebsite.ca vs. ourwebsite.ca/edmonton
ect..

Is it advantages to use subdomains from and SEO perspective? does it even make a difference?

Thanks

[cabowabo]

Welcome to Webmaster World Yakamo!

This has been asked for years at PubCon and Google's "official" answer is the same. "We treat subdomains the same as we do subfolders. They are a part of the same domain and are treated as such."

However, testing and simple searching shows that while Google may want to move in this direction, it isn’t reality. Subdomains are still ranking in Google, ranking fairly well in Yahoo! and dominating in Bing.

The bottom line, subdomains still work well and if you want to do well by owning multiple spots in the top ten, creating subdomains can be a good idea. “But it is going to change in the future, should we still do it?” you ask. Well, as Dan Thies says, “In the future I will have a flying car, but right now I don’t, so I will live my life as if I don’t have one.” ;-)

Don’t let the threat of the future discourage you from marketing properly today. You will suffer ZERO penalty for having a subdomain and I have never had any indexing issues either.

Good luck.

[Adamus]

Adding to what cabowabo said, for your situation I think subdomains will work really well. Use of sobdomains or subdirectories should depend on the specific case. For your city-based website a subdomain makes perfect sense, and as cabowabo said there is no ranking penalty and might even help you rank better for local searches including city names as you'll have those names in your subdomains.