Local Subdomain vs. Local Subfolder

[allurez]

I know this is an issue that's been discussed here ad nauseum but I have, possibly, an interesting case. A third party company created our local search pages, and they perform very highly in SERPs, but are subdomains (local.website.com). But my problem comes down to two things, one of which isn't necessarily a subdomain vs. subfolder issue.

1.a. With the subdomain local.website.com we rank much higher for local search than we do for regular search on our main domain and it's respective keywords, would changing these subdomains to subfolders keep the link juice that the subdomain currently possesses and actually help our website rankings?

b. And what strikes me as the most puzzling is that on local.website.com ALL of the content is identical (I can thank Copyscape for that) to the other local search pages on our own site and various other sites in our industry. I know the duplicate content is hurting our domain, which makes it even more confusing that our subdomain is ranking so highly for things like "diamonds by the yard florida".

2. We're an online only company, and I feel as though gaming the local search function isn't exactly something we should be doing, both from an ethical and an SEO standpoint. Is there any evidence that abusing the local search functions can have a negative affect on a domain's rankings?

Hopefully this makes sense, if anyone needs clarification please let me know and I'll endlessly clarify.

Thanks,

[JaneCopland]

To add to what Cyrus has said, Google will "choose" a version of content it finds duplicated to favour, so has clearly chosen the local. subdomain. The main website would likely fall back into favour if you were to consolidate the subdomain and redirect it to the main site, but I would definitely find out if the third party agency who developed the subdomain has done some promotion of the subdomain that you aren't aware of.

There is no real problem using subdomains or subfolders for specific local rankings / campaigns. I wouldn't say you are gaming or abusing it here - you have a dupe content problem that needs fixing though.

If you were to use subfolders, the duplicate content problem would remain as long as there are multiple versions of the same content, but if you were to consolidate the main site and subdomain's strength, then any subfolders you added to the one remaining site (assuming all content was unique) should inherit authority.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Interesting. I can only imaging that the company that created your local subdomain pages is promoting those pages through local optimization over your root domain, and that's why they are ranking - although this is only a guess.

On one hand, we often get questions about the subdomain/root issue. The simple answer is: if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Google often associates your subdomian with your root, so moving it doesn't always mean an improvement in rankings.

On the other hand, duplicate content is a problem. In this case it might be worth it to 301 redirect the duplicate content to your main domain, and drop the stuff that is duplicated from your other sites.

To address your final question, what you do in the local space can impact your regular SEO, because there is some overlap between the two. One often influences the other.

Hope this gives you some points to think about. Best of luck!