Question About Subdomains

Ok, so I am starting a site that has a bunch of sub-directories (37 to be exact). I am planning on making each of these sub-directories rank on the first page of google and renting them out (I have a proven method for the actual client getting part, so I don't need help on that.)

All the subdirectories say the same thing right now until its rented out because each subdomain acts like a profile for whoever is renting out that site so they say things like "this is where you profile would go" blah blah etc. The only real difference is the city name and other small things like that.

My question is, will having all these subdomains say the same thing be bad for rankings? Like will it trigger spam for Google or duplicate content or something?

Thanks in advance for help!

Trig7 said:

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My question is, will having all these subdomains say the same thing be bad for rankings? Like will it trigger spam for Google or duplicate content or something?
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Most likely yes. It's not so much that you'll get a penalty or anything for it, but google will see that they're all duplicate low content pages and won't rank them well. Once the content is changed though, whatever backlinks you've built to them will help the new content rank.

If you're wanting to get them to rank well before renting them, (to use as a benefit for the customer) then you'll need to create some unique content for each subdomain.

Hmm, alright thanks. Any idea on what I could put on the pages while still getting across the benefits and have the domains still have unique content?

Trig7 said:

Hmm, alright thanks. Any idea on what I could put on the pages while still getting across the benefits and have the domains still have unique content?

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Pretty much anything really. If your plan is to do some work to rank the sites for any particular keywords, then use some content optimized for those. The main thing is to just make each page unique from each other.

Like I said it isn't so much that you'll get any kind of penalty for the pages while you have a standard placesetter type page on them, it's just that they won't really get ranked for anything. Once someone does finally rent the subdomain then they'd have to start promoting themselves from scratch pretty much.

If your plan is to get the subdomains ranked and then use that as a benefit for anyone renting the space then you'll need to actually do some seo on the content of each page individually.

I am actually trying to achieve the same thing & I have a few answers for you. If you site has a lot of backlinks and you create a sub domain, the links from your domain will help your sub domain rank. The more links & the better the PR your site is, the better your sub domains will rank. Look at this company for example communityguide(dot com dot au) you will see how they have thousands of sub domains. Their pages are duplicate content, but because they are PR6, Google doesn't care to much about their duplicate content & ranks their sub domains generally in the #1 #2 or #3 spot. The searches they're trying to achieve aren't competitive, it's mainly directory listings that they're competing for.

By reading what you wrote it seems like you're trying to achieve something similar?

If each subdomain is currently the same, why not alter the robots.txt to "disallow" the search engine bots from crawling each subdomain, and therefore the duplicate content won't affect your rankings because the seach engine arn't picking it up. Then once you have a new client and their customer content in a subdomain you can change the robot.txt file back to what it should be so the seach engine bots can crawl it.

And what type of footprint do you think your leaving with "different.maindomain.com" and then putting that same url in your anchor text? whether that url is teeth.maindomain.com or plungers.maindomain.com.....u get the point..

your main domain is going to be plastered all over the place while trying to rank ALL these other different domains with different kw that prolly arent related to your main domain at all..

Not a good idea..

I use some subdomains (different niche) , and all are ranked well. On the main domain i have crappy automated dmoz directory PR0 , but the all of my subdomains have PR3 and one is a PR4. Each subdomain is treated as a domain.

I think he's setting up something like dallas.electricians.com and sanfrancisco.electricians.com

What you would want to do is have a unique article written for each site, then at the top of the page you can put the same sales line. But under that sales line (This page is available for your listing...) put the unique article with the city info.