Forum Moderators: phranque
I am in the process of formulating a design strategy for a new site and have come up with what I think is a strong multi-topic theme structure along the lines of the shoe example graciously provided by paynt [webmasterworld.com...]
men.mytennisshoesite.com/
with sub directories
men.mytennisshoesite.com/brand-a/product1a
men.mytennisshoesite.com/brand-b/product1b
children.myhightopshoesite.com/
children.myhightopshoesite.com/brand-a/product1a
children.myhightopshoesite.com/brand-b/product1b
women.mypumpsshoesite.com/
women.mypumpsshoesite.com/brand-a/product1a
women.mypumpsshoesite.com/brand-b/product1b
My question is where is the optimal place to start given the size and time to develop the project? Should one start developing/optimizing and submitting content an inch wide (i.e., single domain) and a foot deep (i.e., all canonicals and subdirectories) or a foot wide (i.e., all domains and canonicals) and an inch deep (i.e., single brand)?
Having just gone through this myself, I suggest that you go "an inch wide and a foot deep". Get one domain really well planned out. In doing it, a lot of issues will come up that you'll need to resolve that you won't think of until you get into building it.
Once you have one domain nailed, you will have a standard on which to build the other domains and they will go much faster.
I've tried the structures both with subdomains and subdirectories. There are advantages to both. If you're worried about ranking then stick to subdirectories until you have a real good reason to split off into a subdomain.
The main reason I say this is because of the logistics of managing subdomains versus their benefits. With subdomains you will have separate login accounts...another user/password to keep up with (unless you're mapping the subdomain to a directory in the main account...which may have it's own perils). Everytime you want to make changes you have to close the site you're in and go to the sub-site and then back. Not so with subdirectories where everything is in one site.
Secondly, it adds a tremendous complexity to linking structure...you must use absolute links (especially if your subdomains are subdirectories in the main account)This adds extra K's to the page weight and makes it a tad more work to move stuff around in a WYSIWYG environment. Not a big deal but yet another thing to keep up with.
I've had good success with both methods. I just can't justify the added complexity of using subdomains unless there was a really big mass of content to be categorized under a separate topical subdomain.
As for directory structure and naming conventions it's good practice to categorize by topic and subtopics etc. I wouldn't get hung up on it though and you might want to be careful about stringing out 20-keyword-laden-urls-all-over-the-place.
If you've ever studied the masters in the fine art of spam they don't usually get hung up on the directory/filenames too much and yet they consistently rank high. Oftentimes their pages don't even exist on the server until requested. Their whole web site may be a single 120K perl script and, in fact, there is very little attention given to such details as naming conventions beyond a simple /docs/whiz/0064_33.html.
