NEWS: Subdomains are not good for SEO

Ok, I read a post where someone asked if subdomains were good for SEO and they are not. Here is the reason why:

When you put:
http://www.example.com/
That is the common page which Search Engines index.

However, if you place:
http://example.com/
We know that Google will index it as a different domain name.

Then, if we place:
http://subdomain.example.com/
It will be a different domain name in Google's Index. If you search for websites from www.example.com it will not show http://subdomain.example.com OR http://example.com

Test it out yourself. Subdomains are only good for people to remember, so I suggest you create subdomain redirects. That's why Tripod or Geocities don't have a great PR for their main page. I mean, if subdomains were considered as the same domain, don't you think that Tripod and Geocities would have a PR10, considering how many subdomain free members they have with high Page Ranks....

Discuss any opinions you have about this in this thread, and if you have different theories, please discuss it in this forum.

 

Your points given have no real reference to SEO and are not valid. Of course a search for www.example.com wont show other subdomains. try searching by example.com to get an index with all subdomains.

subdomains are great for seperating your site up if it is large. It will even allow you to have to subdomain on a seperate server.

Although subdomain links may not be as valuable as offsite links, they are still relevant. Most just use subdomains to split up the site into a more managed space for the admin and user alike.


I dont know how you get this is "bad" for SEO purposes.

 

In some situations it's an advantage to have subdomains

i.e., craigslist. org : boston.craigslist. org, chicago.craigslist. org or [pickyourcity].craigslist.org

or ziply . com or citynews . com and so on. . .

-jay

 

Look at www.about.com and tell me subdomains are bad for seo

 

I still don't see conclusive evidence either way. I think it's just a matter of preference. As long as the content is somewhat related then subfolders are what I use. But, if it's unrelated then a subdomain or new domain for sure.

I know G looks for the entire theme of the site, but no subdomains.

 

Hmm. Not buying it, but perhaps what matters is your reason for wanting a subdomain.

 

I think its all in the configuration. A link to the main homepage from its subdomains does not appear to be given the the same weight as a link from a unique and separate domain, but they do seem to be given more weight than a simple insite link from a subfolder.

 

i just did a goog search on 'viagra'. these three guys are on the front page:

http://ehealth.webtech.pl/viagra.php

http://pharmacia.punkt.pl/viagra.php

http://trax.dynu.net/vgr/

 

The title "NEWS: Subdomains are not good for SEO" really should be changed.

* No conclusive proof
* SEO advise such as this should not be should stated as concrete rule. Search engines change their ranking rules frequently.
* If subdomains are so bad - how bad are they relative to other SEO structures

 

Hmmm...I have no evidence to agree w/ cphosts, but it is interesting that whenever google releases a new tool they advertise it as so:
google.com/adsense or google.com/analytics

on second hand, view the following link:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=google

Google uses numerous subdomains.

Sadly, I found pleasure in discrediting my own assumption. I could have just not posted, but I thought someone might enjoy laughing at my thought process.

 

Subdomains are good for branding and (as livingearth mentioned) give more weight than subfolders.
I have also found that getting backlinks to a subdomain is much easier than getting webmasters to link to subfolders. Also, many directories will accept widgets.example.com and reject a submission like: example.com/widgets .

 

http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=google&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

subdomains appear to be fine for all purposes.

 

Most my subdomains were indexed quickly with google. The one exception deserves the sandbox.

I also see improvement within around 10 days with the www. domain all pages in the sub.domain point to. Admittedly I haven't recorded the numbers and it is more of a fuzzy impression I have from watching the digitalpoint backlink tracker and co-op weight.

an aside:
Yes, watching co-op weight has become a sort of seo tool for me. It's fluctuations have clued me in to seo problems and successes many times. The fact that I check it daily to catch sites that need revalidating due to the odd datacenters causes me to take notice of changes. Then I may go look at other tools if I'm really curious.

The google likes more pages factor might take away from the value of not adding the pages in a subdomain, but I bet all factors amount to a wash.

I usually go to a subdomain when adding the content otherwise is just too confusing, or I can't figure out getting some new .htaccess lines to play well with the other scripts.

 

Good point! I've submitted some subdomains (with an odd feeling of guilt) to directories with success.

 

I know (and my experience showed me this is true) that it is recommended to use subdomains. Because they value more than subfolders. So the order would be:

DOMAINS > SUBDOMAINS > SUBFOLDERS > SEO-friendly-pages >SEO-not-friendly-pages (*)

* would be pages like: index.php?page=about&id=5&product=10&refer=/home/

So, friends, create subdomains

 

First of all having subdomains is not bad for seo, it is not proven that it degrade your site. In fact it has a good weight in SE's like google, from my experience google look unto subdomains as keywords to determine a website serp, take a look at ebay, if you look for "ebay motor" , motors.ebay.com and for "free web hosting" keyword, free.prohosting.com, so for me subdomains may be part of google algorithm to calculate the SERP of a website so we can't say that subdomains is "BAD" for SEO.

 

lol, I haven't been reading this thread, I forgot about it I guess I can't really prove it to you then and I was not actually using:
http://www.example.com/
as an example, just supply it with any other domain name...

I am still researching this though, because doesn't it seem odd to you guys? http://blog.cphosts.com/ is not even considered as the same domain name as cphosts.com or www.cphosts.com...freaky..

 

hey dude , subdomains are very good ... If you have a big site , and you have a forum , dating section , ecard etc etc etc ... , then ecard.mysite.com is better than mysite.com/ecard ... Also proper linking between subdomain and the main domain makes the main domain gets more value in Search engines.

 

Subdomains were great for SEO.

I wanted to do an affiliate program for a specific product. So I put it on a subdomain of an established "general" site and it was ranking in 35 days on Yahoo/MSN. After 45 days it was #2 in Google.

Thats all the proof I need.