I'm not sure if any of you out there have heard about the term "silo" [maybe you have - sorry I'm new to this ;-) ] Anyway, it refers to structuring you website in such a way that it follows a logical, themed website structure. animals-domain-here.com/Cats/Cat-Care animals-domain-here.com/Cats/etc...etc... animals-domain-here.com/Dogs/Dog-Care animals-domain-here.com/Dogs/Breeding animals-domain-here.com/Dogs/Breeding/Article01.htm animals-domain-here.com/Dogs/ETC/etc...htm There's a lot more than simply putting pages in proper categories, including which internal pages interlink between another (between related silos, related pages, etc.). Anyway, the reason why I'm mentioning this is that I'd like to follow this website structure (creating "SILOS") for my websites. And one example that I really love that's using this website structure is the About.com website. However, I'm very curious why you think they have used the URL format for the main categories as follows: http://www.about.com/health/ http://www.about.com/education/ http://www.about.com/shopping/ etc.... instead of creating sub-domains like: http://www.health.about.com/ http://www.education.about.com/ http://www.shopping.about.com/ I understand that one reason might be because the way they have set them up read just like regular English sentences: About Health, About Education, About Shopping etc... But then again, why didn't they follow the same structure for deeper related pages? For instance, following the "health" link: http://www.about.com/health/ takes us to the Health related section with various links on the left-hand side. However, each link for the navigation bar is created as a separate sub-domain! For example, clicking on "Acne" takes us to: http://acne.about.com/ instead of: http://www.about.com/health/acne/ But it keeps the correct themed path URL at the top of the page as: You are here: About>Health>Acne Wonderful! Do you think they (About.com) used the format: http://www.about.com/broad-category/ instead of http://www.broad-category.about.com/ merely because of its logical "sentence-like" reading? But again, why didn't they follow the same structure with related topics like: http://www.about.com/broad-category/sub-topic/ ??? If I had a generic domain name that I'd use for different topics like About.com (or just a single broad topic [e.g. dating]), would you recommend to follow About.com's URL structure for main categories and sub-domains for sub-categories? or should I do it the other way: main topics as sub-domains, and sub-topics as folders in their proper sub-domains: maintopic1.maindomainname.com/Sub-Topic1/Article01 maintopic2.maindomainname.com/Sub-Topic2/Article01 OMG!!! That was a long post ;-) I really hope to have some replies from those out there who have a full understanding of what I've written about in this post. Thank you very much for your attention and support in advance! P.S. I tried to post the above questions at the WebMasterWorld forum but my email addreses I used to register were not accepted :-(
About.com has been around since the dark ages so who knows what's going on with their link structure. I like it like this: http://www.intavant.com/ Subdomains are treated a little differently by search engines but if your site will cover many many topics it may be a good approach. I would do what you prefer - proper SEO can be employed with or without subdomains. Subdomains can also be trickier to manage on the backend - stats, server config, etc.