: Can owning a domain name for each city improve search engine optimization? My boss asked me and I wasn't sure exactly how to answer. I'd like to get some advice from others that have hit

@Heady270

Google does not view multiple city domains highly. Matt Cutts has highlighted this scenario multiple times as something that you need to be careful about. Here is an example of him doing so:


Cutts said if you have multiple sites you want to link together you need to have a very good reason to be linking them together, otherwise it will come across as being spammy. Why do you have 20 domain names that you feel should be all cross-linked?

Cutts said about the only situation where this kind of solution is viable is if you're linking multiple country site for the same company together. But even then, he suggested that you do it in a way that won't come across as spamming. This means instead of having 30 footer links to all the different locations, find a smarter way to do this.


Yahoo has been even more forceful on this issue in the past. They have said that no company should have content indexed on their search engine on more than one domain.

A few years ago, it appeared that owning exact match domains (EMD) was a good way to get rankings. Another reason not to use your strategy now is that is no longer the case. In September 2012, Google launched an algorithm to demote exact match domains in the search results.

Today, you get more benefits from having all your content on your own site (I wouldn't even recommend subdomains) than you would from owning domain names.

If you do have pages targeting these search terms you need to ensure that the pages are both


Useful for users
Different from each other


You need to make sure that somebody searching for "this product miami" would rather see the Miami page than any other page. You can make this happen with content and data specific to each city such as:


A list of places to buy locally
Reviews from customers in that city
Deals or coupons available for residents in that area


Publishing the same (or even substantially the same content) on multiple city pages is a formula for disaster. Google views this as doorway pages and they will penalize the entire site from appearing in their search index.

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@Murray155

If it is the same site with shared content then you should use thisproduct.com/miami/ :)
If they are different sites with different content, then use different domains (Some hosts allow you to have one server for multiple domains)

With the 2012 changes Google will cluster sites in it's eyes depending on how they are interlinked, this means that it matters much less if it is on a separate domain or subdomain or even a subfolder.

While a subfolder will not take away an otherwise valuable subdomain like mobile.thisproduct.com.

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@Kevin317

Buying multiple domains and pointing them to one website won't help with SEO at all.

As far as the subdomain thing (or subdirectory as for SEO subdirectories and subdomains are equal) you need to make sure the content for each city is different or else it's all duplicate content and will be filtered out of the search results.

So, is the content going to be different for each city? If not this strategy won't work at all regardless of how you do it.

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