Sub domains

advantages/disadvantages?

[rpking]

We have decided to create numerous content laden sites to help promote our main domain. All the sites will be hosted on the same box and IP as the main domain.

Initially the idea was to buy domain-topic1.com, domain-topic2.com etc. These would then be interlinked and also point to the main site.

However, a neater and more elegant solution would seem to be topic1.domain.com, topic2.domain.com etc.

I would assume the first solution would perform better in the engines individually. If they were all listed in Yahoo/ODP then they hopefully would perform well. They would also boost link pop of the main site.

However, using sub domains is easier, cheaper and more graceful.IMO it also looks professional and gives a sense of scale to a site.

But... will they perform as well in engines? Also, if they all have links from the directories, does their individual popularity increase or the main domain's or both?

Does anybody have any experience/comments/theories?

[willtell]

Yes I do have some personal experience with this. At this time, sub-domains do as well as individual domain names. It really depends on your objective. If your intent is to brand a company name, then domaintopic-1.company-name.com will work great. The sub-domains still needs individual content and not just redirect. Using this method will tie the subdomains to the company name and cannot be separated from the company.

If you have stand-alone sites that don't have any relationship to each other then individual sites will work.

It really depends on what your business is since both of these will work for the SE's.

[Rusky]

Hi Willtell

I am being asked by my company to investigate subdomains for use on our own main site.

Our main site is to do with Web design etc, but we have departments that deal with 3D visualisation and database design and applications. We are thinking of subdomaining to allow for more targeted search engine promotion for these departments.

Unfortunately we are unsure as to what effect having the subdomains on the same IP address will be, as we will basically having the subdomains point to folders off of the main site.

My question is have you experienced any penalties from the search engines for not having allocating the subdomains unique IP addresses. Also all of the subdomains will be reached from the index page of our main site will this cause theming problems for the search engines, thus negating the reason for us subdomaining in the first place.

Lastly I am right in thinking tht if we have all of the subdomains pointing at the same index page content will this be flagged as duplicate content even though they are different domains (I think I know the answer already but would like confirmation)

Any light you could shed on this subject from your own experiences would be most appreciated.

Thanking you in advance.

[rpking]

I am mainly interested in the link popularity side effects. If all the subdomains will increase the link popularity of the main site then that will be the route that we take.

[rpking]

<bump>

Do sub domain listings in ODP increase the page rank of the generic domain ie does sub.domain.com help www.domain.com?

[WebGuerrilla]

There does seem to be a bit of popularity transfer applied to subdomains. I have found it the most noticable when launching new subdomain content from a well established site. Quite often the new content will rank very well, ( and a bit better than the same content on a brand new domain) even though there are no inbound links established.

Of course, it is very difficult to determine for sure, but there is certainly no disadvantage to using subdomains, and the additonal branding effect of using your main domain, in my opinion is a big plus.