Subdomains for US Regions

[taylor.craig]

The company I work for is expanding their business to new territories. I've got a lot of stabilization to do in the region/state where we're one of the most well known companies of our kind. Currently, we have 3 distinct product lines which are currently distinguished by 3 separate URLS. This is affecting the user flow of our site, so we'd like to clean it up before launching our products into the various regions.

The business has decided to grow into 5 new states (one state consisting of one county only) — none of which will feature all 3 products. Our homebase state is the only one that will have all 3 products this year.

My initial thought was to use subdomains to separate out the regions, that way we could use a canonical tag to stabilize the root domain (which would feature home state content, and support content for all regions), and remove us from potential duplicate content penalization. Our product content will be nearly identical across the regions for the first year.

I second guessed myself by thinking that it was perhaps better to use a "[product].root/region" URL instead. And I'm currently stuck by wondering if it was not better to build out subdomains for products and regions...using one modifier or the other as a funnel/branding page into the other. For instance, user lands on "region.root.com" and sees exactly what products we offer in that region. Basically, a tailored landing page. Meanwhile the bulk of the product content would actually live under "product.root.com/region/page".

My head is spinning. And while searching for similar questions I also bumped into reference of another tag meant to be used in some similar cases to mine. I feel like there's a lot of risks involved in this subdomain strategy, but I also can't help but see the benefits in the user flow.

[Robert_G]

I have used (a few years ago) subdomains once, for one of my website. However, for some reason, none of those subdomain built page were ranking so I gave up.

You need to think about it very well. Now, I wouldn't use subdomains but a normal directory structure like root.com/region/product/page.

[Everett]

Hello Taylor,

You are correct that there are risks in this strategy, however I think they are mostly mitigated if you use the cross-domain rel canonical tag (i.e. a rel canonical tag with an absolute path pointing to the "homebase" page). You will also be keeping those subdomains from ranking if you use this tag, so if the goal is to have a landing page for organic search traffic optimized for each region then a rel canonical tag probably isn't the best option, as the only page to rank will be the homebase page, or whichever you say is the canonical version. Make sense?

Please let me know if you need further assistance with this question.