Subdomains and SEO

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Subdomains and SEO

Merits of a subdomain

Roomy

2:46 pm on Jul 20, 2004 (gmt 0)

I was wondering what if any would be the benefit of adding a subdomain to a site for something like a link site/directory feature. Rather than just a new directory for the link script.

Would the PR transfer better?

Would SE's prefer the subdomain, given that the subdomain could include keywords in the leading part of the url?

JonR28

4:33 pm on Jul 20, 2004 (gmt 0)

Hmmm... the only example i've seen of this would be directory.google.com. I think you'd be the first to try it for link exchanging. I say give it a shot.

moishe

6:51 pm on Jul 20, 2004 (gmt 0)

Remember that adding a sub-domain creates a new domain, just the same as if you had www.site1.com and www.site2.com sitting at the same virtual host, so crosslinking between the main domain and the subdomain can be seen as a link scheme by the search engines. This could result in a penalty according to some people....

I think if you are looking to transfer PR, do not do it this way, more PR will be transfered inside your domain than externally.

As to the search engines picking up kw1kw2.domain.com, this does seem to work well, but I dont know that it works any better than domain.com/kw1kw2.

All this having been said, I do use subdomains on my site for the purpose of creating different sites for different locations (travel site with 3 main islands) and for getting backlinks that are more relevent; IE

a site about kw1, I ask for a link to kw1.domain.com and make the anchor text "kw1", this seems to work well, but I have limited myself to 3 subdomains as Google higher-ups have said not to cross-link more than 4 domains or else....

Just my opinions.

Digimon

12:00 am on Jul 23, 2004 (gmt 0)

In my case we use a good ammount of subdomains under the main portal and it works quite fine. Actually some of my competitors are working with a similar subdomain scheme and they are doing fine (not better than me but pretty well ;-)
So I wouldn't worry too much as long as you keep the things under the common sense. If you try to over optimize it can be a problem but if the cross linking flows naturally it will never be a problem.