This is a bit of a melon-twister - Anyone have any ideas?

[simonberenyi]

As a novice I created my main site, (waspkilluk.co.uk) and it was geo-targeted for my local City (Bristol). As I got better I created sub-domains(nailsea.waspkilluk.co.uk) for the smaller towns. Now I am suffering because I need to create a sub-domain for BristoI, allowing the main site to be free from geo-targeting and thus rank more cleanly for specific topics e.g flea control, wasp control etc, etc.

My question is simply this - How do I avoid or limit damaging my existing rankings when I swap the site content over to the sub-domain and remove the key word Bristol from the root domains pages.

Not a short question, but any thoughts would be lovely to hear.

[stubby]

I think you are likely to have duplicate content issues.  All that subdomaining with the city name being the only change - probably not a good long term strategy for you.

First, you are diluting your authority on the various subjects.  The search engines will not know which pages among the many near duplicates are the important pages on a subject.

Second, you are risking future penalties from search engines.  They are constantly improving the algorithms to improve user experience, and all those subdomains with duplicate content do nothing for user experience, except to perhaps confuse them.

[simonberenyi]

That makes a lot of sense, but the big question now then is simply this - how can you overcome the issues of duplication when you are targeting specific areas for a given product or even sub-category?

e.g. pest control - flea control - flea control bristol

This makes the issue of targeting local areas with out being penalized, a tricky task.

Of course I could be over-complicating things.

Do you have any ideas on work-arounds for this kind of challenge?

[Aran_Smithson]

Hi Simon,

Check ou this thread from January, http://www.seomoz.org/q/best-geotargeting-strategy-subdomains-or-subfolders-or-country-specific-domain

Theres some Good and Endorsed Answers in there.

Also check out Rand Fishkins post from late 2010, a little dated but the essence remains the same. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/ranking-for-keyword-cityname-in-multiple-geographies

Hopefully these should set you in the right path.

One additional point to note is to make sure you setup Google places correctly, I feel that will benefit your site greatly.

Cheers

Aran

[MiriamEllis]

Hello Simon, Can you fill me in on the factors that have led to you wanting to make your main pages free of geo-targeting? I ask this because, if your business serves local clientele and has a physical address and local phone number, Google is going to see you as most relevant to your city of location, making Bristol (or wherever you are located) an integral part of the SEO/Local SEO of your key pages. Secondary cities (for example, cities where you go to serve beyond your city of location) can have their own pages, but these will be secondary keywords and not your core terms which would be your services + your city of location. Am I missing something? It would help to understand why you want your content to be separate from your company's locale.