Trying to create themes -subdomains and urls

confusion about themes, subdomains and urls

[jckos]

After reading this good thread, I'm attempting to create a themes site. I'm working on a small online catalogue. There are several themes (and associated keywords) I'm targeting.

I can create subdomains, but they have to be redirects, becasue my site is dynamically generated. Is that a problem? I can't see what the benefit is because the urls won't resolve to the dubdomain names and I'm concerned about submitting them to engines and getting blocked.

Also, I have a function that changes the common dynamic urls to slashes e.g. www.domain.com/knit/. One problem I see is that I don't have the right keywords in the url, which I'm fixing. Am I right in doing that? Some of my URLs, lack keywords after the first level, so the url looks like this [domain.com...]
where the numbers of ids in the db. I would replace them with good keywords, but I noticed those pages don't get any page rank and I read here that too many levels deep won't get ranked with an index that has a low pagerank. I'm just starting out, so it is pretty low.

Any help is appreciated

[edited by: msgraph at 1:03 pm (utc) on Aug. 28, 2002]
[edit reason] no url drops please [/edit]

[paynt]

Hello jckos, Welcome to Webmaster World [webmasterworld.com].

There are sure a bunch of sub-domains (canonicals) discussion going on lately. I find this interesting. I’ll jump in with a few opinions regarding your questions.

I'm attempting to create a themes site.

Congratulations, you have entered a new world of site development. I hope you’ve run a search on the term themes and then fine-tune that search because we’ve talked a lot about themes. Also, when looking for the term sub-domain, subdomain, also check for canonical. We’ve talked quite a bit about that as well.

right keywords in the url…Am I right in doing that?

I like it.

changes the common dynamic urls to slashes

I really like that, wish it happened more often.

For one thing I think you’ll receive more link interest, which can work to your benefit. When I’m link hunting I steer clear from the appearance of dynamic links. Although, I see plenty of dynamic linking accepted by Google so that’s not the reason.

You’re main question about redirects I’ll leave to the technical pros;) I did work on a hub that sounds similar in structure to what you are describing and I didn’t have any problems.

[agerhart]

jckos, would the redirect be server side?

[jckos]

Yes, the redirects are on the server.

[Sanenet]

Instead of redirects, you can use includes, if you have a wildcard DNS. Set up a URL checker and associate a directory with a virtual subdomain, so if sub.domain.com is requested, the site will return domain.com/sub/page.cfm.

This method, however, depends upon you having wildcard dns and control over your server :s

[agerhart]

You should be okay with server side redirects.

[jckos]

Interesting mote about the wildcards. I suspect that my host doesn't offer that but I will check.

Learned something new about DNS.

Thanks.