I am doing the SEO for a user generated content site with thousands of proifle pages. Is it better for SEO if the profile pages are like this www.website/firstname.lastname or firstname.lastname.website.com We currently have it set up as www.website/firstname.lastname and we find that the pages are ranking well in the search engines. Just wondering if it there would be any SEO benefits for changing it to firstname.lastname.website.com ?
Advantages of sub-directory : 1) Conventional 2) Convenient 3) SEO friendly Disadvantages of sub-directory : 1) Appending forward slash or not makes duplicate content. 2) Gets hidden in IE8 and Chrome, since they highlight domain only. Advantages of sub-domain: 1) More web 2.0 , more friendly. 2) If short, attracts users. 3) Better for SEO as domain name get more point than URI Disadvantages of sub-domain: 1) Has to be meaningful - firstname.lastname.website.com looks utterly disgusting. There is no special SEO benefit unless you have pretty large urls.
For SEO purposes, the one big difference between subdirectories and subdomains is that Google treats a subdomain as separate site. So the all the backlinks to your subdomain don't help your main site at all. You can work around this a bit by linking your subdomain to the main domain, but that counts only as an external link. For most SEO-related purposes, just use a subdirectory. If you must use a subdomain for branding purposes, just 301-redirect it to a corresponding subdirectory and you will be fine! I hope this helps.
in your case you are better off doing it as sub directory. for the directory name you may wanna use the unique username.