Subdomain sites are they a waste of time?

not to sure

[crimsonblack]

was told the engiens dont like them yet seen a site with about 10 subs on it

they have there main url like

ww.whatever.com

then have

ww.sub.whatever.com
ww.sub2.whatever.com

is this good?

[trillianjedi]

Where the sub-domain is a keyword, yes. Keywords in URL's at the moment work quite well.

That may change.

I personally haven't been able to work out if there's much or any difference between:-

domain.com/keyword/page.html

or

keyword.domain.com/page.html

Anyone care to comment?

TJ

[prairie]

Keywords in domains seem to be of some benefit at the moment, but their value fluctuates.

I'd stay away from very-long-keyword-domains-and-subdomains.

They look spammy in SERPS and may drive away clicks even if they rank well.

[Livenomadic]

I dont know SEO wise, but for organization purposes I think subdomains are great.

forum.widget.com

This very clearly states what that part of the site is about compared to:

www.widget.com/phpbb2/

I normally have a subdomain for every CMS script I install:

forum.widget.com
classifieds.widget.com
gallery.widget.com
store.widget.com
auction.widget.com
faq.widget.com

etc... etc...

[idoc]

The engines seem to list the free sites just fine such as htt*p://keyword.free*****.com etc. If to you, the site works well as a subdomain it should be fine to the engines as well. If you plan to build 100 keyword subdomains just for the keyword text... probably the way to look at it is... if the site could not stand as a domain site, then it probably won't do well as a subdomain site either.

[edited by: trillianjedi at 7:35 pm (utc) on Jan. 2, 2005]
[edit reason] delinking example URL [/edit]

[fathom]

In general if you have large distinct repositories of content (be that news source, articles, forum, blog, directory or some theme of content that fits together) then subdomains can be a poerful tool.

If you have but a few pages in each - a futile effort.

Large content = 200+ pages and up... less than that it isn't with the "keyword".