Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Now I want to add another topic to this site, say Bags. So shall I create another subfolder like domain.com/bags1/ and domain.com/bags2/ or should I start with a new domain name?
Many back links are there for domain.com/books1/ and domain.com/books2/ and the domain is alive since 2000.
Major concern is that if I start a new domain for Bags topic then it will take much time to get into Google SERP’s and adding subfolders of this topic under the old domain will dilute my site’s Theme. Moreover, as this site is listed in DMOZ it is easy to at least get my new topic subfolders indexed by Google.
I want suggestion form all you experienced webmasters of WW.
IBM or Dell can get away with creating sub-domains, a small business probably cannot. Google are about to tackle sub-domain spam, so don't go that route.
We already know that creating multiple related domains, and linking them together can cause problems.
... so that leaves one big website covering several topics (and I am not sure whether I buy into the theory that search engines assign a theme to a whole domain, there are multiple occurrences where a domain has multiple topics: yahoo, geocities, most .edu domains, and so on).
... so that leaves one big website covering several topics
The site is small at this time but i am planning to expand it, so will a small website with diversified topics will cause any problems?
But you can have bags.domainname.com
This could be a handy option as multiple domain makes a network and that is not acceptable by any searchengine.
In other words, if you have a site oriented toward a main keyword, adding subs will dilute, and you will (or may) lose rank for the main keyword. IMHO
About 2 month ago i wanted to add one more big topic. I thought about a sub domain, but immediately rejected it because of risk of penalty by search engines. i thought about a new domain, but getting the domain, and then paying for hosting, and then promotion and then waiting a year until it's prominent is just not a good idea in my view.
So i created a new directory and put the 3rd topic in there, worked out great! BTW, my domain name means "NOTHING", meaning, it's like 'overture' or 'google', just a nothing name, and anything like a new topic can be branded on it without a problem, i just make sure to name the new directory with a relevant term.
BTW, when creating my domain, i made sure it was a name which meant nothing, because it can be easily branched out into sub-topics.
It is about building a structure whose pillars has to be well built.
I have tried many such tricks in my old domain and I was not at all in a mood of getting it banned by Google this time!
I fully agree with soapystar and Jon_King about the dilution of the main domain but as said by FrostyMug I have a meaningless domain name and putting sub directories under it would be a better option for me. I also take into account all the expenses I have to make to start a new domain and the time it takes to reach a good position in SERPs.
So i created a new directory and put the 3rd topic in there, worked out great! BTW, my domain name means "NOTHING", meaning, it's like 'overture' or 'google', just a nothing name, and anything like a new topic can be branded on it without a problem, i just make sure to name the new directory with a relevant term.BTW, when creating my domain, i made sure it was a name which meant nothing, because it can be easily branched out into sub-topics.
Worked out great? That's encouraging. I'm about to do the same thing! Does your sub-topics get good ranking?
Does your sub-topics get good ranking?
Yes. My sub directory based site is showing the highest PageRank in Google Sitemaps for the last month Crawl Stats.
