Structure of urls

[herculesopa]

**Hallo from Athens, Greece. We have to implement the following project and i need your help: **

We will build a company guide for the whole country and company local guides for each city for the same client.

**Information of the country guide is the sum of information of local guides, so when a user is at the country guide he sees information from companies from all cities and when the user is at city guide he sees info only for the city.  **

The problem is the structure of the url we should have. Should the page of presentation of each company should have structure as

domain.gr/id/company? or

city.domain.gr/id/company

and the one to be canonical to the other? is this good for seo? Should both urls be included in the sitemap? Thank you

[AlanBleiweiss]

For maximum value, I would recommend domain.gr/city/company rather than creating a sub-domain for every city.  This way, every city contributes more directly to the overall strength of the entire site more so than just boosting it's own sub-domain with only a little value passing to the main domain.

Each city's main page then becomes the equivalent to a main product category page.

[herculesopa]

Thanks for your help.

How then we could avoid dublicate content issues as

domain.gr/city/company will have the same content with

domain.gr/company   ?

Any ideas that could help?

Regards

[AlanBleiweiss]

In my scenario, you only have domain.gr/city/company not domain.gr/company so there are no duplicate content conflicts, unless you can explain why you would have two entries for the same company, where one is within a city funnel and one is not.

Or is this a case where some companies would be in multiple cities?

[herculesopa]

Companies will appear both in city guide (lets say athens) and country guide (greece). What would be the best thing to do?

Thank you for your support so far.

regards

[AlanBleiweiss]

Unless there is going to be enough unique content on each copy, there should be only one company page even if it's reached from both paths.  In this scenario, you can list the company in both, but when clicking through to the company page itself, it should be located at http://domain.gr/city/company

This prevents duplicate content but allows multiple paths of discovery, while building overall strength for each city.