Hey guys, on my website I have like 1000 users, which have their own profiles. 1.Should profiles have their own subdomains or be just ordinary subpages? 2.What are advantages and disadvantages of both methods? 3.What would you do to rank these profiles higher in search engines? I was thinking of a "tag cloud" on the entry page of the website which is currently PR4. Could I submit all these profiles to different directories? Would that do any good?
A tag cloud would be good, but you can't link to 1000 different pages from your front page. At least... not a very good idea =) Most directories don't like submissions that aren't for the root domain. Therefore using a subdirectory may make that impossible, but it might be possible if you make the pages subdomains. What is the purpose of the profile pages? Do the users post content somewhere else? I'd think the best way to generate links back to the profile is to let the users do it themselves. When the user contributes to the site, their name becomes a link back to their profile. This helps spread the link love, without over-burdening your front page with a thousand links. - Walkere
In SEO general theory, you should actually use robots.txt to prevent crawling and indexing of user profiles. People will be using internal search features to search user profiles, not the search engines.
But people use search engines to find information, not my site directly. So my goal is that these profiles can be found in search engines. Let me put it this way. Profiles are for my users their mini websites. They have no idea how the internet works so it's up to me to make these mini websites - profiles be found through search engines. How to rank all of them higher.
Maybe you should put "TOP10 USERS" or "NEWEST USERS" on you website homepage. That should help 'em to have a better rank. Everything goes to internal linking.