I am trying to put together a site that covers multiple aspects of a topic and I was wondering if it is better (for SERPS) to use subdomains or subrirectories? Any ideas? Cheers
In my opinion, you don't want a subdomain unless you are shifting gears to a new topic and/or you have enough content that you can break it out while still having a full fledged independent site. In other words, I might create hondas.cars.com since you can build out a full fledged independent site, but I wouldn't create accessories.honda.com simply because there probably is not enough content and because I want to keep the content tightly knitted with Honda so that the engines know what type of accessories I am selling. Remember, in order to rank well, you need to get a lot of good quality links in to your site. You'll never do that if you don't have enough content for people to link to. As much as I hate this corpse of a once great site, about.com (https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=about.com) does a pretty good job of determining when to break something into its own directory. The SEO benefit of breaking content out into its own subdomain has to do with helping the search engines understand the topic of your site. If, like I said, you have enough content to make it a completely independent site, go for it. If not, you can do the same thing by setting up the directory structure to clearly define topics like, honda.com/accords/accessories/. In other words, you are telling the engines that these accessories are for Accords, which is a type of Honda (and not a way to sing together as one). Hope that helps.
Along the same lines as what OddComments was saying, the way I always try to think of subdomains is a separate domain entirely. google.com vs apple.com each subdomain will be treated much more separate than each subdirectory. A subdirectory remains under the domain and as such adds to the domain rather than being separate from it.
if the content for the new section will be unique and in some what great quantity you should use a subdomain. if it's a just another section of your site e.g gamesite-blabla.com/action you should use directories. hope it helps. good luck
Put perfectly. If it's basically an entirely different site then you should use a subdomain, otherwise subfolders are almost always preferred assuming it's on the same server.