I would like to create web pages for specific areas or neighborhoods that I work. For instance, I will have an interactive map of San Diego County on my home page. Guests will then click on the area that they are interested and it will take them to information about that area (so a subfolder of that area or a sub domain). So lets say I have 2 areas I want to target, each with their own subfolder or subdomain that allow guests to search for homes with pools. To make this easy on myself, I will write up a small blurp about what they would get if they fill out the fom, some keyword phrases...etc. and use the same blurp on both pages with the only difference being that in the blurp instead of "area 1 homes with pools" it would say "area 2 homes with pools"

Questions:

1. Will I get myself in trouble by creating these pages with all the same information except the area name?

2. Is it better to create a subfolder for each area or a sub domain for each area?

3. Is there anything else I should know before doing this?

Thanks.

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When searching for information about San Diego Real Estate online, there is only one address on the internet that you need to know to find every San Diego MLS listing in the county and to find out what home values San Diego are, visit SanDiegoRealEstateBuzz.com.

1. Probably not. Sounds like your headings will be similar, but targeting different geographical keywords -- and the listings in those geographical areas would be different, right? And the listings would form the majority of the page's content?

If the listings are the same, however, and your headings are the same except for a word or two, you risk creating what are called "mirror pages," which you would most definitely be penalized for.

2. Almost always it is better to use subdirectories instead of subdomains, otherwise your PR will be split. Google treats each subdomain as a different site and assigns PR accordingly. (A very compelling reason to have domain.com rewritten to www.domain.com (or vice versa) in your .htaccess file.) Though Google has made major headway in this department recently, there are foul ups.

It's a whole lot better for you to have 1 PR 2 domain than 2 PR 1 domains, especially if it's essentially the same site, right?

The other search engines also treat subdomains as separate sites. At least, the last time I dabbled with this, so I could be way off by now.

Sometimes it does make sense to use subdomains to clearly define different parts of a site for administrative and other reasons (think of all the blogs on blogspot.com, for example). And if it makes sense for you to organize your site that way for some reason, you can still use Apache to rewrite your subdomains to subdirectories.

I hope that helps. And other people may have opinions that differ from mine, so I'd like to hear their points of view...

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You were probably thinking this anyway, but just to make sure, it would be a good idea to name the folder the same as the area they serve. Those names will be real easy points with the search engine

I don't believe the search cares one iota what the name of your folders are. It's interested in the content on the page, not the content of the URL. Using reasonable folder names will help you and your visitors keep things straight, so it's not a bad idea for other reasons.

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Fergus Gibson
realestatewebmasters.com

According to Matt Cutts at Google (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/scoble...ng-the-plex/):

That tells me it definitely matters.

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Real Estate Sites Hub: Syndicate your real-estate related feeds on this niche search engine!
Real Estate Copywriter | Automate Your Leads