Dmitry Shakhov very well described the advantages, disadvantages and procedure for promoting a site on subdomains or subfolders by region. Four years have passed since the first version of this article. But globally nothing has changed =)
Subscriber : "Maybe you've asked a hundred times, but still. There is an online fabric store, St. Petersburg region, we added delivery throughout Russia, how to start promoting it in Yandex and Google throughout Russia, can you give a brief diagram. Thank you"
Dmitry's answer :
"There are two schemes. Both are bad. The first is more efficient, through subdomains. Gradually make subdomains for Yandex, registering them in Yandex. Directory. We leave the main mirror with a federal phone number and without toponyms for Google, close the subdomains, try to assign new regions to Google.Business (if there is someone on the ground to accept pin-converters). The second solution is to assign regions in Yandex. Directory to one domain. It takes a long time, it is tedious, you cannot work with toponyms in texts (only on the contacts page). An unacceptable solution is folders for cities to integrate toponyms. The content is the same, you will get duplicates for both search engines - this scheme is exclusively for the case of different content in different cities (message boards, for example).
Main article:
Sergey Koksharov (Devaka) examined the main advantages and limitations of using subdomains and folders for promotion.
In short - a subdomain or dentist phone number data for promotion
Topical issues -
Is it worth moving the regional version of the site to a subdomain? And if there are 100 regions, how to administer them?
Will sections of an online store receive a bonus if they are separated into separate subdomains?
Is it possible to leave the forum and blog in the section or is it better to move it to a separate subsite?
For a subdomain the benefits are:
You can display both the main site and the subdomain in one Top
Can be easily transferred to a separate server
It is easier to analyze statistics
Setting up regions, including content for different language versions
Beautiful addresses
Diversifying risks from domain sanctions