A question on subdomains:

I'm setting up subdomains for each city that my newsletter is published in throughout North America.  They are all identical other than the city name in the title, and the contact page.  I've used dreamweaver templates to make it simple to add new cities/update existing pages.  I'm not trying to trick google into thinking I have a better, bigger site.  Creating Duplicate websites allows me to have a website for each city, and not spend Hours and Hours doing it.

Here is an example: http://petaluma.laughablenews.com.  It creates a "local presence" in each city, as I'm trying to give each newsletter a community feeling.

I think the number of subdomains will grow to 15 or 20 this year.  I'm just a little concerned on what this will do to my Google indexing. I've heard that Google penalizes sites for having duplicate info.  Anyone know if this is true?  Will it mean that the subdomains won't get indexed?  or will it mean that my main site www.laughablenews.com will get blacklisted by search engines?

Any help/advice is appreciated.

  Well, I'm kinda stuck here.  I definitely am not going to create new pages for each city.  Would I be smarter to use robots.txt to tell robots not to index the subdomains?

Would it help if I changed the index.php of each subdomain to have a little original content?  Or do I need to make EVERY page different?

If I could be sure that my main site WOULDN'T be the one that was sent to the supplemental area, I would be fine with it.  I can live with the other pages being lost in cyberpace.

I totally understand what you are saying, and it does make sense...BUT (There is always a BUT)...

I am not creating these pages so that my visitors can view the website in California, and then follow a link to view the same page in New York.  Obviously that would be pointless.  The people would ONLY be viewing the specific website in their area.

If I have a publisher of my newsletter in California who wants to have a presence on my website, this is the easiest way.  They can list a website on their printed newsletters that seems local (ie. california.laughablenews.com), complete with a contact page that sends THEM email.  If  they have to direct people to my main site, and those people have to navigate through our site to find a way to contact the person in California, it just becomes a hassle for them.

I also want to create these subdomains as a perk to my publishers.  If they are unable to create their own web site, this offers them a simple alternative. 

Arrgggh.  Websites...is there ever an easy alternative?! 

I guess another choice would be for me to create one subdomain with all the content (ie publishers.laughablenews.com) and with no city named in the title.  Then I could assign each publisher their own subdomain address (ie. theircity.laughablenews.com) and forward it to publishers.laughablenews.com.  Then each publisher would have a "local" address, and I wouldn't be creating duplicate information.  So I won't have to worry about Google blacklisting me(right?). 

The only problem with that idea would be the contact page.  I guess I could just have a breakdown of all states/publishers there.  Viewers would just select from the list to email someone in their city.

Hmmm-feels like I'm mumbling...if I've become incoherent, I'm sorry.