I have a domain but i want two subdomains for a forum and a questions answers site. what are the pros and cons of having subdomains? issues with googles engine? also linking all the sites together are there any issues with that? any advice would be much appreciated, thank you
also adding subdirectorys instead won't that be treated as one site? because they are different sites forum,and a questions answers site, my main site is for articles.
regarding the pros and cons here's a couple of good examples: http://www.digitalpoint.com/ http://forums.digitalpoint.com/ on Apache forum.example.com resides to /root/example.com/forum - more or less just another document on the server. Google doesn't have issues with subdomains and will rank them in the SERP's just like any other page or site. However if you are concerned with it's potential activity that in such a way could jeopardize the mother site, you can always host it on another ip/host by modifying your DNS settings for that subdomain, you must have control over your DNS though to enable such. ROOFIS
There will be no problem for using sub directories and search rank them normally.i saw the sites like about,ehow using lot of sub domains to market the content.
Sub-domain don't have any issue with Google, if you want the two to be treated as a site use sub-directory...
Both Sub-domain and folders are OK and Google and any other search engine doesn't has any problem with them. But i myself think domains determined almost as a independent domain ( not exactly as independent domain) but folders will be determined as a part of your website. I just said it that you know what you should do for promoting it.
If you only have 3 different sites, use internal pages instead of subdomains. If you have more than 5 normal sites or 2 big sites with thousands of pages use subdomains for ease of memorizing the URL and receiving more type-in traffic. Subdomains inflate the DNS traffic dramatically. Subdomains are almost complete different domains in the views of search engines. They have different sitemaps. They can be hosted on different servers with different IP's. So, subdomains are not good for SEO. Use subdomains only if the content is so big to host on a single domain and the main domain short. Compare these: subdomain.longdomain.tld/internalpage longdomain.tld/folder/internalpage
use subdomain when you cannot put them under on hood, for example, different system, different IP etc, just not easy for small guy to handle, then use subdomains. otherwise, put on path
There is no issue with interlinking your main site with its sub-domains... absolutely none. Sub-folders, however, are generally a better choice when deciding between sub-domain and sub-folders. Google treats sub-domains as a separate site from their parent domain. This means that your sub-domain will NOT benefit from any of the domain level ranking factors that your main site might already have established - domain trust, domain authority, etc. Domain authority, for example, is increased by gaining lots of links to lots of pages on your site. Sites with links primarily to their home page are seen as MUCH less of an authority than sites with those same links pointing to lots of different inner pages. So splitting your content over a main domain and two subdomains means your inbound links are essentially split over 3 sites and therefore your domain authority is split over 3 sites (similar to the way URL canonicalization leads to split PageRank/link juice). Placing the content under two sub-folders instead means: 1) the content under the two sub-folders benefit's from the main domain's trust, authority, etc. factors 2) ALL of the content on the site benefits from inbound links to the content outside the two sub-folders and 2) ALL of the content on the site benefits from inbound links to the content inside the two sub-folders The same cannot be said for the main site w/ 2 sub-domain configuration. In general, from an SEO perspective it is almost always best to use sub-folders than to use sub-domains.