Forum Moderators: phranque
As I mentioned, I'm working with a well established education based site with many thousands of pages of content (only a fraction of which is currently indexed)that has three distinct "sections" aimed at Students (PR8), Parents (PR7) and Education Professionals (PR7). Within each of these "Sections" are sub-sections on topics like finding a college, paying for college, preparing for college, etc...
Currently they are using the following site structure:
www.example.com for the Students (PR8)
www.example.com/Parents for Parents (PR7) and
www.example.com/Educators for the Education Professionals (PR7)
Since each subdirectory/section has unique content geared towards the particular audience they are trying to reach and since each section has sub-sections another level down, we are discussing moving to a subdomain based structure such as:
[Students.example.com...]
[Parents.example.com...]
[Educators.example.com...]
[example.com...] would now be primarily a splash page pointing to the three subdomains.
The feeling is that it this new structure will allow us to:
1. Split out the relevant sections to "unique" domain names with unique content.
2. Increase the relevancy (ever-so-slightly) of the /parents and /educators "homepage" and any sub pages within.
3. Make it easier to get multiple directory listing in relevant categories.
4. Give us a shot at getting multiple listings in the SERP's (for each subdomain) for certain keyword phrases that are relevant across all sections.
5. Allow inward pointing linking pages to point to the most relevant content.
6. Make it easier for spiders to crawl the sites as they will not have to go so deep to get to all that good, relevant content.
The questions that have come up include:
1. Since this site is more than likely considered an Authority Site in it's field, would splitting the site out into subdomains hurt that in the long-run?
2. What about PR issues? What downside/upside is there to making the switch from a PR point of view?
3. Since www.example.com is primarily targeted at students, would it be better to leave www.educationsite.com as the Students section and just move the Parents and Educators to subdomains?
4. What would be the best way for redirecting users from the subdirectory pages to the subdomain pages?
5. If we move to this new structure, should we be using a robots.txt file to keep the spiders out of the old subdirectories.
6. How do 301 redirects work and should they be used to redirect the subdirectories to the new subdomains?
Finally, what other things, both pro and con, should we consider or be aware of that we may have missed?
Any and all suggestions would be most appreciated!
Thanks,
Steve
[edited by: txbakers at 6:04 pm (utc) on May 26, 2004]
[edit reason] hid actual functioning URLs [/edit]
You listed six reasons to make this change and conspicuously absent is any discussion of how this will benefit your users. Webmaster guidelines provided by SEs imply "build sites for users, not SEs, and you will avoid problems." That is reinforced by SE reps occasionally as well. So assuming you're building for the long term...
Further, the days of successful "subdomain spam" are numbered. The technique is becoming common enough for SEs to be aware of it and I see indications some are actively blocking it.
