I'm considering creating a content site in a highly-competitive niche with the obvious domains already taken. Does MSN weight subdomains equally to domains? For example, would these sites rank equally on MSN for the word "bluewidgets"? bluewidgets-r-us.com bluewidgets.your-next-european-vacation.com Would it matter if your-next-european-vacation.com was an existing site with some backlinks and a bit of authority, but nothing to do with bluewidgets? Would Y! and G behave differently from MSN on this? Thank you.
I'm not to sure to much about this but I guess it wouldn't matter too much. Take del.ico.us for example. It ranks really well for the search term delicious. Best to wait for someone with more knowledge than me on the subject though
Subdomains are fine to use for site organization. Look at how digital point has used them for this Forum. I have tested a large site and ran up the numbers to 10,000's of pages using subdomains and a whole lot of redundant data (junk text). What's crazy is I pulled all the subdomains a couple of months ago and in some cases they are what shows in the search results ahead of the domain. Subdomains with one targeted keyword still seem to do okay. But they are not outranking good .com primary domain names. MSN used to (at least it seems, and many wrote about) give a little boost to well constructed keywords in subdomains. But a lot of things have changed in the past year with MSN. I've had many sites move around that used to be really stable. So the answer to your question is NO. If you need proof search any competitive niche and see how many subdomains appear in the top 30 results. If subdomains were the answer people would be jumping on them. It's not hard to see these kind of results. You can't really hid the URL from display. I work my share of completive domains - niches like Travel are flooded and while you think the good domains are all taken, if you are creative you can still find some good ones. Use keyword tools like Word Tracker, Check Yahoo to see what is being searched, check ebay to see what is hot... then combine two or three words to find yours. It's still possible to register good .com's.