Can too many subdomains hurt ranking?

[johnlim9988]

Hi,

Our site has over 30 sub domains, also have over 200 sub directories, will this affect ranking?

thanks.

John

[Quadrille]

In most cases, you'd be better off putting all the content on one or two sites (depending on subject matter). SEs for the most part, treat subdomains the same as full domains.

So you are marketing 30 domains, and sharing incoming links between 30; if you had a smaller number, you'd have less marketing / promotional effort. And more concentrated links.

Which would probaly be more effective.

Plus yyour site navigation would be less of a nightmare, and less visitor confusion.

If some of your content is 'different' enough to use a subdomain, it would probably be wiser to go the whole hog and give it a domain of its own. Else a folder is usually better.

[johnlim9988]

Is it ok to have many sub directories (over 200) and sub domains (30) together?

My friend's site sell a thing and this thing has many categories.

At first, he list all the things according to locations, so have domainname.com/usa/ca/san-diego/allthings.html;
domainname.com/usa/fl/miami/allthings.html;
domainname.com/china/shanghai/allthings.html etc etc

Then he also list all things by categories first (use sub-domain) then list by location,

so also have following file structure,
category1.domainname.com/usa/ca/san-diego/things1.html;
category2.domainname.com/usa/ca/san-diego/things2.html;
category3.domainname.com/usa/ca/san-diego/things3.html;
.............
category28.domainname.com/usa/ca/san-diego/things28.html;

category1.domainname.com/usa/fl/miami/things1.html;
category2.domainname.com/usa/fl/miami/things2.html;
category3.domainname.com/usa/fl/miami/things3.html;
.............
category28.domainname.com/usa/fl/miami/things28.html;

category1.domainname.com/china/shanghai/things1.html;
category2.domainname.com/china/shanghai/things2.html;
category3.domainname.com/china/shanghai/things3.html;
........
category28.domainname.com/china/shanghai/things28.html;
etc etc

Now the probelm is that we create many unique contents at files like,
domainname.com/usa/ca/san-diego/allthings.html;
domainname.com/usa/fl/miami/allthings.html;
domainname.com/china/shanghai/allthings.html etc etc

We don't have many unique contents at files like,
category1.domainname.com/usa/ca/san-diego/things1.html;
category2.domainname.com/usa/ca/san-diego/things2.html;
category3.domainname.com/usa/ca/san-diego/things3.html;
.............

Now the problem is that the site don't have good rankings.

What should we do? Need change the file structure?

Thanks.

John

[tedster]

I'd say that using subdomains with very thin content very well might cause trouble. It's something spammers were doing to exploit wild card subdomain possibilities and Google needed to deal with the practice. Quadrille got it right, I'd say. Unless there's a distinct business purpose for using a subdomain for some subset of your content, I would stick with one bigger site.

[mack]

The problem I see with sub domains is diluting your content, Unless you have very different content on each of the sub domains I would suggest keeping it all within the main domains. It's like setting up several sites all in direct competition with each other. It takes a lot more effort to make one of those sites really crank in terms of search engine ranking because the effort it being diluted. If your sub domains are in any real way related there really is no point to separating them out when your could combine all the content into one truly powerful site.

Mack.