Me and a friend of mine are about to start making some niches that are quite related but still different enough in order not to be under the same domain name. Let's say that we want to make 3 sites for 3 metal bands manowar ,ramnstein and rapsody We are thinking of doing one of the following: a)Buy one domain for each something like manowar.com , ramnstein.com and rapsody.com (hypothetize that these names are available) totally 3 domains for a price of about 20 $ b)buy one main domain something like www.metal.com and make 3 subdomain names for each manowar.metal.com etc price 7$ So here are my two questions: 1) Will manowar.com have better SE ranking from manowar.metal.com if all the other contributing factors are equal(page ranking,backlinks etc) and if yes how big will that difference be ? 2)If metal.com has a certain pageranking will all the other domain names automatically grant the same pagerank or will each domain name have a ranking of it's own,making for example submitting to various link lists(just for making PR) useless ?
Re 1: I think manowar.com could get you more natural traffic, and the SE's might value it a bit more then the subdomain. No hard figures there though. Re 2: you won't spread PR from your own domain to your own subdomains probably, but it might help... In all: it's a matter of taste. I myself would go for 3 different domain names.
ok thanks for the info guys i guess i'll go with multiple domains even if it is more expensive at the beginning
I think using separate domains would be better although subdomains would also be considered separate domains by the SEs and you will have to build links and SEO as you might do for a separate domain.
Separate domains do better than a subdomain, however... It's been my experience that with subdomains, subdomain, the shorter the domain name, the better your ranking. For example, manowar.shortd.com will rank better for manowar than manowar.longdomainname.com (it's always best if the domain is related to the subdomain) manowar.com will rank better than both of them C.
Separate domains look much more professional. A domain is a professional and a subdomain is his personal assisstant. Both do the same work but the former gets all the credit. LOL Aditya