Hello, Recently, a change in laws has forced my business to totally change it's business model. We have decided to create information based websites that will earn income from advertising such as Google Adsense, Affiliate, etc. We have enough money in the business to adequately fund the development of a very large site, but we want to make sure that this is the best route to take. We are leaning towards using one domain name and 10 subdomains at this point. The subdomain will contain the main keyword of the theme of that portion of the site. For example, credit-cards-domainname.com would contain the credit card information portion of our site. We have plans for 9 other subdomain ideas at the moment and most of them revolve around financing. However, we are wanting to include other areas that may not be directly related to financing such as cell phones. Eventually, we want our domain name to have a tremendous amount of information in all kinds of fields. About.com has done fairly well with this style site. We want to stress that we want our site to cover just about everything eventually. This is not a niche site, but maybe a general site that contains many niches. Here are my questions: If you were going to create a site for 10 different themes, would you be better off from an SEO standpoint to promote 10 different domain names or one domain with 10 different subdomains? Would the synergy of developing a large site, in any way, offset any possible SEO penalitiees? In general, do directories have issues with subdomain sites? Generally speaking, if you planned to build a large site, are there any unforseen issues with using the subdomain structure for the site? Possible issues from using subdomains: Most directories only allow the submission of one or two keywords per domain name. There is concern that we will be limiting the power of our directories into just a few keywords for a few categories. If we were to add “cell phones.domainname.com†we may have trouble properly promoting it in the directories and therefor may miss out on valuable anchor text. (At this point, we should have a PR 6 or higher site that is ranking well for finance terms). Possible benefits from using subdomains: By creating a community and merging people from various topics, we believe that we will gain tremendous synergy on the site because most people have more than on interest. They should be able to discuss as many interests as possible on our forums, for example. We have numerous business ideas and it would be nice to find a way to fit them all under on website, if possible. We understand that we are building a very large site and it will be quite an undertaking. We are okay with this concept because we'd like to spend the rest of our lives developing on huge force as opposed to scattering ourselves too thin. Thanks for you help / ideas. Brandon
I would go with the subdomains idea. I would try to figure out what the common concept of all subdomains would be...and make that the main domain. Meaning, if all the subdomains are going to be proving product reviews..than make the main domain www.product-reviews.com Than each subdomain can be a different product, like: electronics.product-reviews.com and cellphone.product-reviews.com With one of my newer sites you can see i used this strategy:http://www.custom-website-designs.net/ The main domain talks about website design and each subdomain talks about a niche of web design like ecommerce and such.
Here's another good example of using subdomains in this manner: http://www.home-n-gifts.com/ That site has tons of subdomains that are listed at the bottom of the page.