Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I have taken over a portal. It has a good PR of 6 on its home page and also the inner pages have good PR. The portal is a part of a big media group in my country who have many online properties with good PRs. So inbound link building wouldn't be much of a problem.
I feel the potential of natural search optimisation was not much realized over here. So inspite of good PRs and online properties, On page Seo was lacking, so the site is not showing up for most targeted keywords in google in top 5 positions. But then i do not want to change the look and feel of the portal over nite for seo purposes, as the brand identity and existing user base should not be lost.
Therefore I would like to create sub domians for each targeted keyword and then get in the links, so that the sub domains achieve high rankings (within top 3 in google natural listings) for targeted keywords.
Now the question is are sub domains Ok, are they allowed by Google, is it white hat seo?
It is cerainly not black hat when used for the correct reasons - but will google know that?
however i would definately put search engine friendly content, also would maintain look and feel of main site like colour, images etc without putting in duplicate content.
the sub domian would be a completely different site, with its own content set for search engines, except that it would maintain look and feel of main site to keep the brand experience intact.
If you can't optimize your main page, do it as pages with additional information for specific keywords, and link to them with these keywords from main page - it will additionally improve ranking of main page for each of these keywords (you put <a href="/widget.html">Widgets</a> on main page, and make content rich page 'widget.html', and your Google result for 'widgets' will likely comprise of two pages: main page and widget.html. I did it in such manner many times with such results.
bump? i need more replies
In my opinion, go for it...
Kaled.
I just recently went back and looked at everything that was done prior to the disruption, and my forum is now a directory, and the subdomain is a 301 permanent redirect to that directory. I don't know if this made any difference or not, but the coincidence was too much to chance.
I would never set up a subdomain based only on keyword. My subdomains are themed for a specific purpose and to organize material that is the same but different than what I offer on the main domain. There is overlapping internal linking but the navigation for the subdomain is self contained. For instance, I have a 'tip' section on my main domain and a separate 'tips' section that is specific to the theme of the subdomain.
I have never experienced a sandbox with a subdomain so I can't comment on that. I know that my subdomains do less well on Yahoo then they do on Google or even MSN. Also, I don't add lots of new pages at a time. I steadily add a few pages a day or several over the week.
As to duplicate content, my theme or audience is slighlty different for my subdomain so the content is specific to that audience. Even though the information is similar, it's enough different that I'm not duplicating exacly the message I offer from my main domain. I think if I were setting up subdomains based only on keywords that this would be a lot more difficult to accomplish.
<edit for spelling>
Hosting is that cheap now, unless sub's avoid the sandbox, I fail to see the real value
Recently, I launched a site as a subdomain from a domain that's never been used, although it has had the same owner since 1997. It ranks great, and gets every new page indexed and ranking within a day.
For an older site, active and popular since 1999, every subdomain gets it's on ranking, even though it will never outrank any similar page on the main domain. But these subs are only used as mini-sites for small specialized web shops. They hold 2-3 pages, and rank really good for their specific search terms.
My experience has been the same as AndyA's. My subdomain urls have always had zero PR and I suspect Google is treating the link back on each dubdomain page to my main site home page as an external link from a PR 0 site, killing my PR.
However, I think the problem may be that my subdomain links are actually CNAME redirects to an offsite service I use (not a pay for click thing or other, but a booking engine so a legit part of my site).
In this case Google has never assigned any PR to any "subdomain" page, even tho it crawls and indexes them.
Anyway, had no problems all rank PR 5/6 along with rest of site index pages. In fact Dmoz even has some of them as separate sites, although I never requested they were added. Alexa also shows different links to them.
Google does act a bit weird when you look for links to main site as it shows thousands of links from the subdomains...not sure if any issues regards that but regardless I think our users find it easier with the sub domains.
I use sub-domains because it's easier for me to monitor how much traffic each state is getting via AWstats, if they do well in the search engine result pages (which they of course do!) that's just an added bonus.
By using this site architecture method, I can then let my potential advertisers know how many visitors each region is getting, so they can use our targeted advertising options for maximum exposure to there right target audience.
Works quite well.
btw..That netmechanic link was a good read!
