Sub Domains Best Practices

I see what TO do but what should I AVOID?

[mida68]

I've been reading the many posts on creating subdomains to go along with site themes. I have a client who is selling a service but the services fall into three distinct categories, so we'll set it up like:

www.domain.com
category1.domain.com
category2.domain.com
media.domain.com
(for the media portion of the site that is realated to both)

The ISP sets these all up in the same root dir so I'm assuming that the subdomains will resolve to the original domain in a way what we assign like www.domain.com/category1
etc...

I keep reading that subdomains are useful **as long as you are careful**, can anyone explain what we need to avoid so as not to be penalized</b>

[marcs]

Make sure to avoid duplicate content issues. Like both category1.domain.com and www.domain.com/category1 getting indexed with the same content.

[mida68]

Hmm, I'm confused. If category1.domain.com resolves to www.domain.com/category1 wouldn't it *have* to have the same content? Like a redirect? Maybe I don't understand the "resolving" issue.

Any more advice is appreciated, I want to make sure we "do the right thing" ;-)

Thanks!

[Drumat5280]

I am also confused. I would like to create a sub domain too but I am afraid if I set it up incorrectly Google and other SE will not like my site.

[dnbjason]

If you have a subdomain.domain.com pointed to a subdirectory folder of your main domain. I would just do a Apache Redirect from the subdirectory to the subdomain. Then you don't have to worry about duplicate content.