The title pretty much says it. I am just wondering if you have non related subdomain names does it have an effect on your SERPs for your targeted keywords? Thanks in advance.
Hi there, it an ongoing debate on how Google is going to regard the sub domains in future. Read a little bit about it. 1. keyword.yoursite.com <---- this is a sub domain yoursite.com/keyword <--- this is a folder So, your question depends on two things. 1. the competition around the keywords. If its really heavy competition you will be better off with creating folders. That because the folder is part of your main domain, and the link juice passed to your main site will also pass to your folders. If you start a subdomain, this will be regarded as a new domain, and you will have to do heavy link job in order to rank. Same as if you start a new domain. Subdomain are by many webmasters used for spamming. According to Google (official blog <--- read there as well) you should ONLY start a subdomain if the information there are significantly different than on the main site. Example: Travel site: One subdomain for each country with loads of information.
Thanks that pretty much answers my questions. I am redoing a site and it used subdomains. All of which are not relevant to the new site and keywords. As long as it does not work against me than it is not to much of an urgency.
I disagree!!! Again, if your intention is to spam then its bad. If you are serving quality content, there is no limits on how many sub domain you may have. And keep in mind, google (official blog) also state that they will limit the numbers of links pointing to your site from the front page to 2. Hence removing the point of spamming the SE. Example: if your main site is targeting Watch, and you have 100 sub domains targeting the same keyword. Only two pages will be listed when someone search for the term watch. That ofcourse doesn't include the sitelinks.
I highly agree. Now that I it is put that way you have to think about sites like about.com. Every different topic is a different sub domain.
IMO - creating un-related sub-domains should be avoided. But if the sub-domain is related and heavy unique contents are put into it, then it will bring more targetted traffic from SERP. These days, G seems to be giving penalties to duplicate contents and weighing highly to unique contents. Link building has become a small part in the game unlike yesteryears.