Subdomains Or Subcategories?

Hi everyone,

I just need an opinion about a matter that confuse me some time..

I have a website which is a price comparision site like pricegrabber.com, shopping.com etc. We are conducting business almost for 2 years.. We learn so much on those years and now we redesign our site to better serve.. We rewrited our core system -compare agents, robots etc.- now its finish. We are on user interface. Ofcourse what we experience on those years is organic search is the key for our business, actually if i say that the idea behind rewriting and redesigning our system is SEO - thats true. Many of our friends calls us crazy for it...

Anyway, we are deciding our URL strategy. I google on this matter and there are many articels about it, many of them has different approach, some says the subdomains are magical wands, some say subcategories are better, i consult many of SEO experts, and they also have different approach too. (I even call Google Office in my country, they didnt comment - at least i try )

We have 9 main categories on our site and 500 sub categories. We like to design every sub category as a subdomain. For example; cell-phone.oursite.com - television.oursite.com... (for all of our sub categories- 500) The content is not duplicate ofcourse, every of them has uniuqe content.

We decided to use subdomains because we think (as we read in many articels about it) using keywords in domain is a plus. The negative for this aproach is (again according to our readings) google treats subdomains as a new website thus every subdomain has different PageRank. (Bytheway, our PageRank is 5) Actually i personally think different PageRank is not a bad thing, i believe most of our subdomains gets good PageRank soon because of quality content and backlinks.(not so soon perhaps but eventually)

But there are debates about subdomains - this approach may seen by google as a trick and may penalty us. Also some SEO experts says that siplitting site into subdomains is no additional value, they say make it with subcategories.. I dont know why but i believe otherwise yet im here to ask you... What do you recommend;

1- cell-phone.oursite.com or www.oursite.com/cell-phone (Our landing page is product page ofcourse, and it seems to me its better like this; cell-phone.oursite.com/iphone-3gs-16GB)

2- We do it because of placing keyword in domain for better result in SE, can Google or MSN may penalty for this? Not now maybe but in the future? (Silly question i know, but i just need opinion)

3- Managing subdomains is not easy - is it worth it?

If you please share your experience and ideas about it (good or bad) it would be super helpfull...

Thanks in advance...

 

Mainly the content will matter the most. Regarding the subdomain or the directory structure, subdomains are treated as different entity separate from your site and if the same content is there in folder structure, then the page adds some weightage to the site. So, according to me it is better if you have your site's categories in folder structure rather than subdomain. Subdomains might be used for solitary promotions though.

 

thank for sharing information with us that's great and have luck to you are going to do.

 

Thanx mate, we deceded to go with subcategories...