Do subdomains get a search result or pagerank penalty? I imagine they do, but I want to know what your thoughts are If they DO have a penalty would it be better to use one than a folder? EG. dogs being the desired search result www.batman.com/dogs VS dogs.batman.com Thanks in advance
It's been my experience that folders are part of the root site, whereas subdomains are seen as a new, separate site not connected (at least directly) with the root site. I have seen sites where they use subdomains as part of the site (e.g. suckered.us and bush.suckered.us) they are all separate sites but they are all part of the main site. It is kind of a black-hat SEO trick so it may be changed how search engines see subdomains soon, but that's not fact as of yet
I've got a site with a related sub-domain, and Google treats both as the same site as far as I can tell. I have a site-wide menu link to the sub-domain, so that might make a difference...
No, subdomains do not get a penalty. However, I believe search engines always favor the index page above any other page of a website. Regarding the subpage name, I wouldn't worry too much about it. Both versions would work just fine. The main thing you should worry about is how well you market that page. For a keyword like "dog", it would be very difficult to get top rankings unless you do some heavy marketing for that particular page.
Interesting. Now lets go one step further and consider Virtual Subdomains as opposed to physical ones. Proper use results in subdomains being considered "external" or backlinks as opposed to internal links. PS it's not blackhat. It is if you were to generate 500 million random ones with ads on them HOWEVER if you use unique content it's a whole different ballpark. I would never recommend you do the above method and abuse the system or they'll simply wipe your site and ban the main domain.
folders like sitename.com/folder/ is better because subdomains are completely new domains for search engines
Subdomains always wants more efforts in search engine rankings than domains... So, always try to make good link building for subdomains. best of luck.
IMO sub-domains don't get a penalty, but they also don't inherit the Authority status associated with a web-site. They are out on their own with a looser coupling to the domain than a folder.
Again why not take it from experience from someone who's taken a site with zero traffic inside three months to 50k uniques per day and a half million page views combined daily as well as an alexa ranking approaching top 100k and under 30k in Canada and 102k in the US already. Between all countries I'm fast approaching 200k inside 3 months. I literally crushed a dual xeon with 4 gb of ram last night with the traffic. Earnings are LARGE.... Now I and my partner will be doing a press release via PR web.. Watch what happens. I really disagree that internal links are better than external .. reason being each external can have a different set of keywords pending on subject.
I think doesn't matter. I have a subdomain and the site is releasedabout month ago and I have more than 200 visits per day.
Thanks guys, seems like there are a lot of somewhat differing opinions on this... What i'm getting is that multiple sub domains linking one another is the same or SIMILAR to different domains linking one another. And some of you think that this is a blackhat trick that will soon be eliminated ?
@Uyasar - Somewhere on this forum, I read an interesting analogy of Black Hat SEO with the underworld. Black Hat SEO is unethical, since it does not obey the standard norms set down by search engines and tends to reap short term advantage in favour of the website by directing traffic to it without allowing web surfers to enjoy any advantage or benefit (sometimes worsening their situation). In short, anything violating SE rules can be considered as Black Hat SEO.