Advise please : Subdomains or Directories

Hello all,

I'm building en new website that is structure like comparable to wikipedia (much smaller of course).
A site with a alot of topics.
I'm going to have hundreds of topics like car, mountain, flower, albert-einstein,....
All of this topics will have subsites like a information, forum, pictures,....

What is the best way to setup the site :
A)
mysite.com/mountain/forum/
mysite.com/mountain/pictures/
mysite.com/mountain/information/

B)
mountain.mysite.com/forum/
mountain.mysite.com/pictures/
mountain.mysite.com/information/


Thx in advance !
Gert

 

You don't have to create a separate directory for each category. You can use a .htaccess file to make seo url.

 

thanks for sharing nice tips

 

Friend, I tell you from my experices, if you have resources go for subdomains...Having many subdomains will greatly help you in terms of SEO...Search engine treats sites with subdomains a liitle fairer that it treats the sites without subdomains..Especially when you have more subdomains...you have more chances of hitting the top of google...

 

this is a debate more than 8 years old. in that time there has been no noticeable difference between subdomains or subfolders.

If you look around at some high-ranking sites... You will often see subdomains. But that does not mean the reason they rank highly is because they were subdomains. they could have built the site up just as much as if they had used subfolders.

You should probably be more concerned with your content management and how you're going to manage subdomains versus subfolders because in watching the net for eight years I have not seen anything significant to convince us to use subdomains or else you would see subdomains on the first page for every search term... Yeah think of it like that.

 

thx for your comments and opinons.
For me personally, and in my case, I like subdomains more because of the readability of the domains.
car.mysite.com is in my opinion more readable than www.mysite.com/car/

But ofcourse if I get more traffic by using directories, I would use them.

Any more thoughts are still welcome

 

According to me subdomains will helps you more. you can check some high ranking sites they are using subdomain instead of sub folders

 

The issue with subdomains is that you would have to SEO each of them, but directories would get a boost from your domain backlinks as well.

 

Sub domains are better because u can submit more than one url in a same directory.

 

I 've heard Matt Cutts saying that sub domains and folders are treated equally... It wont affect you rankings in any way. But for the convenience it is better to use directories.

Just read this blog about domain and directories
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/