One Domain vs. Multiple

[cameron]

I'm may be helping someone develop a business idea. The business sells paid listings targeted at local communities. The owner is planning to have 400 communities involved. The service is the same for each community. It's not specially tailored in any way.

I'm wondering what the best way to go about this would be.

- single domain with sub folders for each community
- single domain with sub domains for each community
- separate domain for each community

I think the guy may have actually already registered 400 domains. Based on my experience, I think it'd be a lot easier to manage the whole site on one domain, and would probably be better for backlink building/seo. I think it may be difficult to tell someone that the $xxxx they just spent registering domain names was a bad idea, so I figured I'd ask to see what the pros/cons are.

[rpanella]

Actually for link building and SEO having a domain for each site would probably be better. People would probably be more willing to link to cityservice.com than yourdomain.com/city/ since it would be seen as a whole site dedicated to that community vs just a sub page on a bigger site.

If you had not registered the domains, I would have suggested going with subdomains, but if you already have them, and can justify the cost of renewing them each year, I would stick with the separate domains.
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Herbal Vaporizers (http://vaporshop.com)

[Chris]

I would do the domain route only if all the domains have indentical branding to them.

Then, you can make them easy to manage with complex server side setups so that you can run them all off 1 set of scripts and 1 database.