Subdomain VS Subdirectory

[geefex6nsy]

Hi guys i need help i cant decide which path should i take but 1st let me start by discussing about my goal and the company background.

The website is a listing more like a classified ads that manually verify each listings before we approve and we only allow listing of condominiums nothing else. We cover 10 countries. Our current website structure is like this

http://website.com/singapore

http://website.com/thailand

http://website.com/malaysia

and so on

our goal is to dominate each local search queries, like lets say we like to rank our domain

http://website.com/singapore

• where people from singapore who uses local search engine could find condo's in singapore

is local search engine like http://google.com.sg

whats the best way to do it?

should i leave the structure of our site that way or through subdomain?

http://singapore.website.com

as what i have researched its more beneficial if we use subdomain but most articles are old im not sure if this can still be achieve today.

To all gurus please enlighten me. What strategy should i choose, any tips would also help.

Thank you very much. (sorry for my bad english, its not my native language)

[tdawson09]

I would go with subfolders versus subdomains. With subfolders you draw upon the strength of your whole website. With subdomains, each subdomain has to stand on its own. (Internal page linking, backlinking and content) By keeping everything tied to your root domain, you have greater value. I've learned this by experience with our own older strategies of using subdomains. Building up a bigger site with more pages is better.

Each subfolder, with its own localized topic, will rank just fine as a page, because it is supported by your larger site.

[WhoWuddaThunk]

This is the suggested best practice by many SEOs.  You will also want to go into Google Webmaster tools, and Geo target each of these subdirectories.

[CleverPhD]

Agree with this 100%.   If you read through stuff on QNA you see subfolders over subdomains all day long.

[geefex6nsy]

thanks a lot i have more to learn