One of our client offer a specific service to around 200 cities in the United States. He want to setup 200 sites to promote his services in all these 200 cities. He want every site to get traffic from google search ( 1st page of google SERP ) by doing seo and planning to get his sites listed in the top positions for the service in the city ( Example, "some services in Washington DC", for this keyword he want his website for "Washington DC" to come in the top 10 position of google SERP ). But the content for all these 200 sites going to be the same except city name, phone number, address and slight changes as per the city targeted. How good is this idea? Is this idea against google guidelines? If there is no problem with this idea, what will be the impact in the long term? I know there are better options but just want to know whether there is any risk involved in this.
Its a bad idea. Instead of creating of 200 websites create one with the main keyword. Then add 200 city pages to main website like this -example.com/some services in Washington DC example.com/some services in New York
I don`t understand. You have so many information to write about each city. How can the content be the same? I mean, don`t you even do a city description? I don`t think that you will manage to rank in top 10 with thin content, especially for big cities. If the content isn`t unique, maybe you should just create a single website with a page for each city. Or maybe create a website and create a subdomain for each city. (for example: washington.website.com, bucharest.website.com etc )
Agree with both posts above. Either subpages or subdomains are better idea. It will be also easier to manage all the content/services that way, not to mention the expenses for 200 domains, 200 hosting plans, 200 dedicated IPs and finally the SEO expenses for 200 different domains... I myself would go for sub-pages with unique content, tags of course and related links from unique IPs for each single city page. Another point is that it will be easier to rank the home page way better for the main service KWs (without a particular city name).