Hi guys, We have a site project where we would like to have a particular website rank high for about 10 key terms, each sharing one word in common. However given the nature of the visitors we think they would respond better landing on a particual sub domain for the keyword or sub folder, that has unique content. So when they search for keyword widgetx, they would find widgetx.lotsofwidgets.com OR www.lotsofwidgets.com/widgetx/ Which one is better and easier to market regarding links and the way Google sees it? Is it easier to rank higher, faster, by pointing all incoming links to the main domain versus sub domains or subfolders? Any guidance on this would be very helpful!! Energizer
Optimizing subdomain has one advantage that is your chances of getting more listings in serp for a keyword. For example google for "yahoo" hope it will clear
Different strokes for different folks. Its up to you. Portals do it because they have their general domain name, then sub-domains which are targeted, then sub-folders from those sub-domains. Targeted domains don't really need to do that because they already have an on-topic domain and sub-folders will do the trick. As always, its your preference and their's always exceptions.
I would never use subdomains if keywords are related. Google thinks a subdomain and a domain are different websites, so supposing you use folders in your domain, all links pointing to your domain will help you with that folder, cause SE uses domain's popularity. However, if you use subdomains, domain's popularity is 0 and you will need firstly to build more links for your keyword than you would need if you have had used folders in domain. Just my opinion
Hi guys, THanks for the advice. I did some research on what you said Calivad and what Mong said. I would have to agree. I noticed some sites using the schema described such as www. cheaphotelsx .com and then subdomains as in dallas.cheaphotels.com and newyork.cheaphotelsx.com. Then on those pages (using this example) they would put on newyork.cheaphotelsx.com a subfolder with links pointing to newyork.cheaphotelsx.com/manhattan-hotels/ or newyork.cheaphotelsx.com/bronx-hotels/ - that sort of thing. I guess this could make sense if you are targeting ALOT of related keywords, though in our case I think its better to rank sub folders based on one domain (if we had 60 keywords maybe it would be a different story). If we assume that subfolders in a site can take advantage of the incoming links to the straight domain (in addition to their own) they have an advantage over the sub domains where this is not necesserily the case (assuming google counts them as completely seperate website that don't share incoming links). Since we have like 10-15 keywords, I think we'll just stick with the sub-folders, whose ranking can get boosted by the incoming links to the main domain. I noticed as well that google will show a second result from your website below where your main domain appears in the ranking, indented (search digital point forum in google to see an example) and this is almost as good as showing two results from your site that are not indented (main domain and sub domain)...