chiyo - 1:57 am on Feb 5, 2002 (gmt 0)

maybe the subranking of subdomains may be due to the small number of pages usually on subdomains - being in reality a subdirectory. Maybe they are not being penalised for being subdomains as such but becuase they have relatively smaller content.

Paynt's expereince may be due to the fact that her subdomains have a good number of pages.. (say the 100 that brett mentioned in his 36 steps) Subdomains created for the purpose of SEO only on the other hand may have much less content.

Simultaneorusly, I see domains (regardless of whether they are sub-domains, or standard domains) with a large number of pages being favoured by algos and domains with just a few pages demoted.

Any SEO must have at least mused about splitting their domains into many independent domains since Search engines many years ago started returning only one result per domain. It gives you maybe many more chances of being hit for a specific keyword of phrase.

That would mean that a domain with 100's of pages of great content would be disadvantaged against the 3 to 10 page domains. Maybe theming solved this for search engines, where it was difficult to theme based on just a few pages.