Hi all, I've been lurking these forums for a while, but havn't really felt the need to ask any questions or post uneccesarily, since most information is right there or valid points have already been brought up. I've been quite perplexed by this for some time and, although I've tried searching, I havn't found anything that spells the entire question out in black and white. I'm basically launching a site soon which'll let users sign up for a variety of services. Now here's my quandary - should I allocate them subdomains (theiraccount.mydomain.com) or have it in a www.mydomain.com/theiraccount.html (via a simple mod_rewrite) format? My thinking here is that when they link to their informational pages, they'll be indirectly linking to my TLD, as opposed to just linking to their subdomain (which certain engines now apparently treat like separate entities). Your thoughts? Cheers and thanks in advance!
I would be more inclined to sign up for a service that provided a subdomain...but your suspicions about weighting may be correct...so both have their (dis)advantages.
Absolutely my dilemma - would I lose more signups due to a lack of subdomains, or would I offset the lack of subdomains by placing far higher in the SERPs? What're your opinions on Google's ability to bring targeted traffic to your site?
Hi it entirely depends on what is required to be achived. Subdomains are seen as seperate entities and the links to the main domain could hold a bit more importance. As they are seen as seperate this is great if your structure is likely to hold "duplicate" or near duplicate content. Example: we have a health site of which the main site is the intro, categories and shopping facility whereas the product details are on subdomains. This gives us the ability to have different "design bases" and avoids potential duplicate content as the full blurb is on the subs and some compressed blurb is on the shopping / intro part. It's also a lot easier to manage than to have full blown domains. The only potential disadvantage we're seeing is that new products / ranges may take longer to be included in SE's and may take longer to rank as there is limited initial weight to put behind. On the other side of the sacle we have a completely flat structure of 1500+ pages (travel) where we have abstained from any structure as each page in itself is important and has logical links to others. This allows us to "target" a maximum of key phrases but is not easy to manage specifically to avoid "dupes". New pages are indexed within a day or two and are immediately available for advertising and ranking Technically subs are very easy as since php 4.3 or so globals diminish and superglobals are in and if you set the session cookie to .mydomain (yes dot mydomain) it's valid and avilable across all subs and main. So session is easy to manage as well. Hope this helps Expat PS From a user / visitor perspective I don't think it matters as long as the target page is what they are looking for regardless of it's structure.
Thanks a lot for that response! However, would a link to a subdomain add ANY PR value to the TLD? I'm imagining people will post links to their subdomains.
I don't care much about PR as it's purely mathematical and doesen't tell anything about quality of content. That said it's easier to push a PR on a sub than the pr on a main thus one could push one or two to high pr and than the link back to main would leak some of it to the main site.... and the other way round. Should you use subs and find it may not work for your particular set you can always abandon it install a redirect (or mod_rewrite) to structures on main and go on using structures. A clean 301 always transfers any existing goodies seamlesly. The other way round is much harder.... Cheers Expat
Thanks a lot for that info! With that, I've decided to go with subs that'll have static links to the main TLD. Although I'd suspect their effectiveness may be diluted by being on the same IP. Cheers for the information! It's greatly appreciated.