100+ sites in different towns, Duplicate content question - Offline Business

As long as you liberally sprinkle the city's name, and substitute out some unique text in every subdomain, you won't have a dupe content problem. However, if you just blanket copy exactly the same text on every town's page(s) then yeah, you might have a problem.

This just boils down to good web copy. Study other examples (like CertaPro, Huntington) who have done this well, and copy what they do. Both of those companies have GREAT search engine results for each local franchise location (I know this because I build supplemental web directories for both of these companies). So don't re-invent the wheel.

I think making a separate domain for each location is insane. The maintenance alone is going to drive you insane. You'd be better off building out the "corporate" pages, and then have a subdomain for each location, and make it all database driven so you don't have to hand-edit the locations' pages. The locations can use shared resources, like contact forms, etc... Don't need a separate contact form for every location... that's too much work.

Save yourself a lot of headaches... use subdomains.

Peter,

I have another, similar view for you, with a twist.

The fastest way to do this with the least effort, that has been proven to work is an automated site generator. I'd strongly recommend a macro generator like Push Button Marketer. You can build the site once, paste it into a macro program and spit out as many sites or pages as you could ever want. It's an awesome way to do this without investing a ton of time.

I personally would be more comfortable with separate domains, as it would be harder, but not impossible for Google to recognize the duplicate content across domains, especially if they are on different IPs.

As far as content, I'd follow ehicks727 advice up in this thread by ensuring title tags, meta tags, etc. all have different city and state/province/village (or whatever) names. It's so easy to "program" the variables in a macro to paste them into the code, don't worry. I would take it a step further and also:

• have blocks of copy that you can swap between different URLs
• force the city, state names in the alt tags of the graphics
• force the file names of the photos and associated alt tags to be city specific
• force the file name of the HTML pages to be city/state specific
• header and footer graphics file names could be unique and / or location specific too.

Bottom line - if you have enough key elements of every page being unique, you'll be fine. I've seen other domains that have done this with great success. An automated site generator makes this way easier.

Lastly, if you don't do it well enough for Google, then you didn't waste a lot time building the properties with the macro type program.

Mark