Should i use sub domains?

[vaib]

Hi every one out there
I am in a bit of confusion and need some advice . I am planning a new site and the site can either have 3 sections ( Big once each having more that 500 pages each) now what i am thinking is that should i use sub domains www.subtopic.mysite.com for these three sections or should i make normal sections i.e. www.mysite.com/subtopic . The third option which i may think is of making 3 different sites all together . I am in a fix on what to do . Can any one guide me how should i proceed .
Thanks in advance
Vaibhav Kakkar

[maximillianos]

I think some search engines (like MSN) favor putting the keyword(s) as subdomains, while others may not care as much.

I use keyword subdomains for one of my sub-sites and it seems to help with my pagerank, etc. But I don't use it very often.

I think it comes down to a personal preference on design. For instance, yahoo has their site setup so you can access many different sections via subdomains. (ie - finance.yahoo.com) It makes it much easy to remember than www.yahoo.com/finance/ in my opinion.

Just be sure which way you want to go, because if you decide down the road to switch, your current pages/search engine rankings will have to be re-indexed with the new page/url format you choose.

Good luck!

[vaib]

Thanks for the reply . 1 think i would like to ask is that is there any kind of negitive effect of using subdomains on the S.E. robots? While i was researching on this topic I read some where that yahoo slurp does not likes sub domains (3rd level subdomains) but this was some time back .I would like to hear from you all about the recent experiences on using subdomains . Has any one felt that the use of sub domains is hampering their site growth.
All the replies are most valuable for me so i'll request all those who have any experience on this to share your experience
Thanks a ton
Vaibhav Kakkar

[vaib]

Please share your valuable experience .
Thanks

[vaib]

Strange no 1 out there to share your experience on Subdomains? Is the yahoo slurp against them?
Any 1?

[tedster]

History report: a while ago there were a lot of wildcard subdomains - sites with thousands of subdomains for almost any keyword, but almost no content on any particular one. Search Engines began to take steps against this approach to ranking.

But if each of your subdomains has focused and substantial content, you should not run into trouble at all. Many major sites use subdomains - About is one. If you want to study their success in the SERPs you'll see that subdomains can be fine.

[microcars]

currently I only use sub-domains for hosting high bandwidth content such as videos.

The page the video is on is on the main domain, but the content is pulled from the sub-domain. another nice thing about this is that I can put a bandwidth cap on just that one sub-domain and when it reaches it's limit for the month (for my hosting), only that content is not accessible. The rest of the site will function fine.