Hi i was doing some SEO research for my new site that im currently finishing off. It started off as a personal portfolio which is why i chose the domain name www.rosenberg.es Now im expanding my website and found that the domain name is also an important keyword. However, now the main theme of my site is "Tenerife photos" so obviously both the domain name and main theme do not coincide. My question then is if i registered subdomains with words that correspond to the main theme and redirect to my home directory. For example if i I make a new subdomain: tenerifephotos.rosenberg.es Would google penalize me for possible black hat or could i get away with this? Thanks!
I think depends on what type of redirect you are going to use. If you use 301 redirect, you will not get any panalize. But remember, by using 301 redirect, your new sub domain will not be got index by google.
Don't worry about it. Leave the name as is. People care that the site is about "Tenerife photos" (whatever those are), so the name could be joeschmuckenburger.com and if the title of the page is something about Tenerife photos and the meta description states in a sentence or two that the page is about Tenerife photos or what they are, and the site is about Tenerife photos, then that page will get results for Tenerife photos. Period. Yeah, it's nice if the domain name matches, but the most important thing in the world is what the site is about. That's what people are looking for, content. So that's what Google tries to index sites by, content. You'll be almost wasting your time running around in circles if you're worried about domain names. You could do a subdomain, tenerife.rosenberg.es, if you want, but you wouldn't notice any difference. The nice thing about a subdomain is that you can then dedicate that part of the server to the Tenerife photos, while the regular, main site can either remain the personal portfolio or go on to something else (do you think it's unlikely you'll change your mind again at some point?) But it's not any worse to do rosenberg.es/Tenerifephotos or something. Same content on the same domain either way. 301 redirects are more meant for established websites who need to change their url, and want their old customers/visitors to be able to reach it via the old name, or sometimes when a comapany has two names (coca-cola.com should also get traffic from people trying to type coke.com, if they own that domain).
thats great, thanks for the response. I will give it all a go and see what results i get. Till now i was only aware of a normal redirect, now i know what a 301 redirect is... thanks again! I forgot to mention that Tenerife is a small island and popular holiday destination. Its part of the canary islands that belong to spain, just off the coast of morroco...
Ah, we should have said... 301 is a permanent redirect. Something you do once. That's why smiles said Google won't index it.