Duplicated Content in Subdomains

[texken]

I am helping someone with an SEO issue and wanted to run this by the forum. On their website, they have the main domain (example.com) and about 8-10 additional subdomains for different cities where they do business (newyork.example.com, atlanta.example.com etc). The content on these additional domains is 98% identical they just use the different cities in some of the descriptions, title tags etc. Window Washing, New York Window Washing, Atlanta Window Washing etc.

What are the consequences here? I see 2 problems:

1) Essentially duplicate content on multiple domains
2) Looking at their analytics, only about 30% of the organic search queries being sent to atlanta.example.com have atlanta in the query at all. 70% of the traffic being driven to the atlanta site aren't people looking for atlanta services.

Thoughts?

Thanks.

[jag]

Duplicate content will not help sub domains. The results will be filtered at one time as similar.

Site traffic depends on the relevant keywords you choose and how many potential customers are in need of your services.

Best,

[texken]

Originally Posted by jag

Duplicate content will not help sub domains. The results will be filtered at one time as similar.

Site traffic depends on the relevant keywords you choose and how many potential customers are in need of your services.

Best,

Thanks for the reply. I'm not sure I understand what you are saying however. Sorry for the confusion. I'm asking if the duplicate content may actually hurt them in this case. I understand WHY they did what they did. They figured they'd have a better chance coming up for "Atlanta Window Washers" if they have a page that specifically states that. But instead of making a targeted landing page, they basically just duplicated their main site 10 times across 10 subdomains. Seems like it could be trouble. Or maybe it's a proven practice...

[jag]

If they have a unique content landing page or subdomain for "Atlanta Window Washers" the results would be good as you add off-page optimization efforts. Duplicate content can cause trouble at any time.

Best,

[deanpowel71]

Duplicate content cant help anyone at all. It always will be considered as duplicate so it certainly is not a great practice.