I have a question... Say I have a product to sell (funny shaped things) and I want to sell different colours of that product to different places. Do I set my site up like this..... www.funnyshapedthings.co.uk then have subdomains like so... www.england.funnyshapedthings.co.uk www.scotland.funnyshapedthings.co.uk www.ireland.funnyshapedthings.co.uk www.wales.funnyshapedthings.co.uk and SEO each subdomain differently. Or do I just have my homepage www.funnyshapedthings.co.uk and have a link to a page for england, a link to a page for scotland etc etc... What's the difference? And more importantly... Would Google see any of this as duplicate content? Twelfty
It makes no difference if it's on a subdomain or a subdirectory. And it wont be duplicate content unles it is duplicate content. Do you plan on having duplicate pages?
Not duplicate pages... one page will talk about funny shaped things that are RED and available in SCOTLAND the england page would be the same except the words would change to say BLUE in ENGLAND. and so on. other than those changes, the pages or subdomains would be the same. Is that considered duplicate content?
www.funnyshapedthings.co.uk/england www.funnyshapedthings.co.uk/wales is best by far, then you can build links to www.funnyshapedthings.co.uk and all the pages will gain from that. The bigger your site is the better. If only BLUE and RED and so on is different, but 500 other words are the same that should be duplicate yes. Dependes on <title> and stuff also.
It should not have any significant differences.. descriptive titles, META and content is all you need
Seeing that Google webmaster tools handle subdomains somewhat inconsistently (some information, like search queries, is aggregated on subdomain level, while other information - like top content keywords, only on main domain level), I'd go for pages instead of subdomains.
You should create subpages instead of subdomains if they are relevant to the site. The subpages will be considered a part of the site by google. A subdomain will be considered a whole new site
use subpages......then the trust from the main page will be passed to the other pages....once you get ranked for one term, it will be easier to get sub-pages ranked for related terms
subdomains are better, get faster indexed and better rankings. look at craigslist if you dont believe me
Here's a discussion of the benefits of subdomaining from SEland Domaining and subdomaining I've seen craiglist go up an down a long way (between #1/2 and #50) in local search results over last 3 months. Whatever algo change brought it up so high is likely to be rolled-back. Everyone noticed the rise of Wikipedia and Craigslist to the top and there's been a lot of shouting at Google over this. Craigslist results in my experienced were relevant results because by the time postings made it to Google, many have been deleted. it's definitely an advantage to have keywords spelled out in URL's. Even if it doesn't help in ranking, it helps in being noticed on the SERPS page b/c of keyword highlighting.
Craigslist gets indexed fast and ranks well because it's craigslist, Not because they use subdomains.
Craigslist has risen very high in the rankings suddenly. Don't ever remember seeing Craigslist results before 2007, then they started popping up on top spots for competitive local terms.
what you are talking only happens to big sites, like google.in and google.ca etc! or in.yahoo.com or au.yahoo.com stuffs! for the smaller sites this is not quite required, i would suggest you to make one home page and optimize it with your full resource, that will be better!