Subdomain or directory

From a SERPs standpoint which is best? Or is there no difference?!!

For example,
http://forums.1st-for-florida-property.com or
http://www.1st-for-florida-property.com/forums/

If you are trading a backward link which url should you use?

 

When I was talking to SEO Guy, he seemed to think having a subdomain was more advantagous.

 

It's common sense. Anyone can create a page named some-keyword.html. But changing a site domain, thats a big jump.

Hexed

 

I wouldn't think it mattered a whole lot to be honest. The one thing I can see being better about a subdomain is that if you have a keyword subdomain more people are likely to link to you with that keyword as opposed to a subfolder as they see a subdomain as whole different section of the website, and a subfolder as just a continuation. This is more just a psychological thing than a real seo principle, but I feel it would be the case none the less

 

You can make subfolder and place index.html file in it. that way its look like subdomain to the SE and users.
But to be honest i don't think it make a much different in SERPS.

 

Subdomain works better for a forum, because the urls have one less "/" in the urls. Google perceives pages with less "/" in the url as more important, and crawls them more often. There's a patent where they mention a logarithmic formula where they use the number of "/" in the url in a document retrieval score + I read one paper about their crawler which said the above about the urls. I don't know if the number of "/"'s are used in rankings but I wouldn't be surprised if there's a little difference in the ranking. If there iss, the forum on a subdomain will improve your main page's ranking better (links from pages with less slashes) and will improve it's own ranking for pages on the forum.

 

We sure that a sub-domain is better? Makes me want to redo it.. lol.

 

It seems to be proven that SIZE does play an important role in the serps. Sites with a large number of pages require less Backlinks to place well than do sites with a few pages, especially on highly competitve keywords. You can see evidence of this when using the Keyword Analysis Tool (link in sig below).

Google sees http://keyword/domain.com/page.htm and http://www.domain.com/keyword/page.htm as being pages from two different websites.

So, if you have 1000 pages on www.domain.com, http://www.domain.com/keyword/page.htm carries much more clout (coming from a site with 1000 pages).

While http://keyword.domain.com may only contain a few pages.

This site size factor does make a difference and should be considered.

 

On a similar note, does anyone know if Google places an upper limit on pages/per domain (perhaps effected by pagerank?) ?

Despite trying every trick in the book with mod_rewrites and sitemaps I'm still stuck at about the same number of pages. I had a whole load of Amazon Web Service(AWS) pages on the site, but have since added 500,000 odd comparison shop pages, of which I've only managed to get 5,000 odd indexed.
Do you reckon creating subdomains with a max of 100,000 odd product pages each would increase my chances of getting them all indexed?

 

This seems quite significant - seen no other comment about it. If this is true then I think I would be tempted to abandon subdomains and use directories.

But does Google differentiate between subdomain and domain/folder? It is afterall still the same IP address.

 

Don't get me wrong.

Subdomains have their place. But to create one mainly to use the keyword one more time in the url and then add only a few pages, will not get you very far in the long run.

 

So.... months later. Which is better? Have people proven their theories?

I have a site that i've been creating sub-domains for other small sites. These sub-domains have about 5 pages each. Would it be more beneficial to be in directories under my main site instead? That way increasing the page count on my main site?

Did that make sense?

 

mcdar is correct: see Folders vs. Subdomains for a discussion of the pros and cons of each,

 

Subdomains are seen by search engines as seperate and distinct sites, and are treated as such when ranking.

Which is better for SEO depends on many things, not the least of which are the site size and content.

If you want your site to rank well for country specific searches, then IMO you would be better off doing neither but building seperate sites targeting country specific phrases and supported by a country specific TLD name.

 

Yep. Just like it said in the referenced article from Highrankings.com.

 

Not quite Minstrel, you have to read the other parts too, or is there some other point you are trying to make?

 

I've read and researched and i'm still confused. For a small 5 page site, would a directory be better or sub domain? Most research I found had to do with big honkin sites or they never really answered the question.

 

If you have only a five page site, I fail to see why you need either a subdomain or a directory structure, since five pages in one directory is simple and works well. This can either be the root directory or it can be a directory with a keyword name.