domains and seo and ranking

[johnn]

Hi,
I would like to know, suppose I have a url www.xyz.com and folder a. I could do:
www.a.xyz.com
or
www.xyz.com/a/

Which one is better for seo or ranking?
Thanks,
John

[Filipe]

My theory (and with domain names, they're always theories) is that you get the keyword boost for when people link to you. So if someone provides a link to you using the domain:

www.widgets.com/fun/

Then you will get a higher relevancy for the word "widget", "fun", and "fun widgets".

I've personally seen this work. I've had a domain name, let's say it's

www.nutballsoup.com (not a real domain name)

for the sake of argument. It's a site about crazy people doing crazy things (not what my site was about. Just for example purposes). Because so many people linked to it as such:

<a href="http://www.nutballsoup.com">NutBallSoup</a>

I ended up being #4 on Google for the word "Soup". It's not really related to my site, but it happened. (Again, my site was actually totally different. The point is: You can get ranked based on your domain name because of link popularity, even if your site has nothing to do with that term.)

[toolman]

>>>Which one is better for seo or ranking?

IMO the added work of maintaining subdomains isnt worth it. You can get good ranking either way, it's just more complicated to use subs.

[Marcia]

The only factor I question is whether links are worth more from outside the site than within, or the same. I wouldn't use subdomains unless there was a distinct topical difference, just so a directory structure wouldn't go too deep.