Does this sub-domain serve to my website popularity?

[Armin666]

I have a service website which has clients from all over the world. They use this website to connect with each other. They need to pay to use this service. As a new strategy we want to make our services free in a certain country. Changing the coding and development of this strategy would be too expensive. In order to spend less we are thinking to create a sub-domain like Canada.ourwebsite.com . Then make a duplicate of our website and locate on that sub-domain. That sub-domain would be just for Canadian and they can use all services of the website totally free. The rest of world will use the main website. On the other hand we have two different websites that one of them is linked to the main one. We are assuming the free website would become very popular and grow so fast and this is the purpose of our strategy to make that sub-domain so popular and then transfer the juice of this popularity to the main website. It is the right thing to do? Does this help marketing and increase the visibility of the main domain? Does a popular sub-domain help the main domain?

Thanks guys

[FedeEinhorn]

Yes, subdomains linking to your main domain do flow link juice. However, having the exact same content could be an issue unless you noindex it, which will result in no juice being passed to the root domain.

I would take a different approach tho, as you said, it could take far more coding, but the results would be much better. Make the root domain accept canadians a free customers (don't know how you are going to pull this, ips, sources, etc), but this approach will get the link juice directly in your root domain instead of passing it through the subdomain and probably getting a penalty for duplicate content.

Also, take into consideration that if Canadians get the service for free just from accessing from Canada, other users from other countries may just use a VPN (like HMA) to access the site and look like Canadian visitors...

Hope that helps!