Re: Subdomains and Google Ranks We are corporately working to get as much branding and the SEO value to the domain "domain.com" as possible and wanted to open a discussion about the pro/cons of the following: We are trying to get an understanding of the impact to SEO if we begin running some web forms under a URL of "resources.domain.com/ibm" for 2-3 months and then change the location to be www.domain.com/resources/ibm and do redirect of the original URL "resources.domain.com/ibm". Also, how are 3rd level domain ( i.e. resource.domain.com ) compared to primary domain ( i.e. domain.com ) as a base URL for web sites for SEO rankings? What the best practice for getting them to be advantageous to each other? Thanks in advance, Taylor
Whenever you change the location of a URL make sure you use a 301 redirect to point the old URL to the new location.
3rd level domains are treated as a separate website entirely. The only problems you are going to run into are the sites being on the same IP address, but even that will not hold you back by that much. edit: Okay now that I think about it, if they ARE going to be on the same IP address, there is no reason why you shouldn't be able to have them all linking together.
Well if they were on separate IP's, you would want to trick Google into thinking you were not the same person owning all the websites, but I don't think that applies here, I made an edit above...