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I am ready to launch a new project that will provide information based on location (think Gumtree). Each of the 50 locations will have the same categories and will have unique content for that location.
At present my URL's are structured like so:
example.com/location1/category/pagename/
example.com/location2/category/pagename/
A worry of mine above is some sort of 'duplicate penalty' as the same 'category' will be used in all 50 locations. If there are 10 categories thats 500 urls with the same url just with a different /pagename/. If I then have 10,000 /pagename/ thats a big number of urls with the same keywords.
Subdomains are apparently treated as separate websites which could work in my favour, each subdomain will be a mini-site with unique information only geared to their location.
Should I really worry about my current - user friendly - url structure or just go ahead with the it?
I would appreciate if WW members could give me their opinion on my situation.
My personal preference on subdomains vs. subdirectories is that I usually prefer the convenience of subdirectories for most of my content. A subdomain can be useful to separate out content that is completely different. Google uses subdomains for distinct products such news.google.com or maps.google.com, for example.
Matt answers similar question:
Kalena, using subdomains for stuff like fr.example.com or de.example.com is still a great approach, because those sites may be similar in idea, but the language is usually completely different.
[edited by: caveman at 1:50 am (utc) on Dec. 18, 2007]
[edit reason] Removed link. [/edit]
