SEO effect of URL with subfolder versus parameters?

[Searchout]

I'll make this quick and simple.  Let's say you have a business located in several cities.  You've built individual pages for each city (linked to from a master list of your locations).

For SEO purposes is it better to have the URL be a subfolder, or a parameter off of the home page URL:

https://www.mysite.com/dallas  which is essentially https://www.mysite.com/dallas/index.php

or

http://www.mysite.com/?city=dallas  which is essentially https://www.mysite.com/index.php?city=dallas

[Andrew-SEO]

Thanks Miriam, This is very helpful and makes a lot of sense. What do you think of towns and villages, or boroughs of a large city. Do you think the close proximity is dangerous territory re: keyword permutations?

I take your point about unique content tailored to the people of the city - it makes a lot of sense. But what about locations that are closer to each other?

I know it's a tricky question but any insight would be most welcome.

[MiriamEllis]

That's a good question, Andrew. It's true that it's no longer a best practice to build out a set of pages featuring slightly different permutations of a keyword  (car repair, auto repair, repairing cars, fixing cars, etc.). That approach is now quite dated. Honestly, it never made any sense beyond the fact that when Google wasn't quite so sophisticated, you could trick your way into some additional rankings with this type of redundant content.

The development of location landing pages is different. These are of fundamental use to consumers, and the ideal is to create each city's landing page in a way that is uniquely helpful to a specific audience. So, for example, your store in Detroit is now having a special on winter clothing right now, because it's still snowing there. Meanwhile, your store in Palm Beach is already stocking swim trunks. For a large, multi-location Enterprise, location landing pages can feature highly differentiated content, including highlights of regional-appropriate inventory and specials, as well as unique NAP, driving directions, reviews from local customers, and so much more.

The key to avoiding the trap of simply publishing a large quantity of near-duplicate pages is to put in the effort to research the communities involved and customize these location pages to best fit local needs.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Searchout,

Good for you for creating a unique page for each of your locations. I like to keep URLs as simple as possible, for users, so I'd go with:

mysite.com/dallas

mysite.com/boston

mysite.com/chicago

etc.

From an SEO perspective, I don't think there's a big difference between root URLs and subfolders. If you're using one structure, I doubt you'd see any difference from doing it differently (unless you were using subdomains, which is a different conversation).

[GastonRiera]

Of course that cities will be counted.

That´s why im always reinforcing the idea of creating UNIQUE and Special pages for each keyword.
Google is getting smarter and smarter, so simple variations in a few words are easly detected.

Hope it helps.
Best luck.
GR.

[Andrew-SEO]

Hi

Thanks for your response I'm interested in this too. I've been targeting cities with their own pages but I head recently that google are going to be clamping down on multiple keyword permutations. Do you think cities will be counted in this?

[GastonRiera]

Hi there!

In my opinion, for SEO purposes it is correct to have a unique page (really different from other, not just changing the city name and location) por each big city you are optimizing.
Thus said, a subfolder is useful in order to show google the name of the city in the URL. It is common that google considers parameters different than folders.

Also, remember to avoid duplicate content. /dallas/ and /dallas/index.php should not be accesible and indexable for google. Redirect one to the other or canonicalize one to the other. Same with www, non-www, http and https versions.

Hope it helps.
Best luck.
GR.