Brett_Tabke - 3:51 am on Feb 4, 2002 (gmt 0)

>I use subdomains and do a lot of cross linking.

Sounds like a good recipe for future disaster. I don't think you should use 3rd level subdomains today.

They'll be at least a dozen counter responses to the following :-)

-engines loath 3th level subdomains. You have to be a pretty big site to sustain 3rd level domain.
-some engines have been known to ban hosts with 3rd level domains for no other reason than they are 3rd level domains.
-stick to domain.com and www.domain.com and that's it.
-if you have 3rd level domains, get rid of them.

The amount of spam that flows from 3rd level domains have turned them into the pariah of se's. Wild card dns, round robin dns, and virtual hosted sites have made 3rd levelers a lost cause for se's to attempt to sort it (even if innocent, they call 3 levelers "dns spam" in almost any and all forms). So they do what they always do, they draw large brush strokes to get rid of them. It's hard to sort out goodguy.domain.com from badguy.domain.com, but it is very easy to say "delete *.domain.com".

Only Google seems to deal with them properly for the most part. They are dealt with as separate domains. The value today of 3rd level domains is less than zero. If you are _not_ doing 5k or more a day in se referrals now, nuke 'em.

Lastly, don't use frames. SE's don't care for frames and don't index them properly. Every study on useability of frames show a wide segment of users don't care for them, don't understand them, or consider a site "broken" that uses them. They are chopping 30-50% of your page views right off the top before the word go. People see frames and hit the back button.

>every page quality content

Not every page. Sure you are going to have some traditional mandatory pages (contacts, about, generic info, sign ups, resources, and a few index pages that are navigational only...etc). I'd keep those under a dozen.