Welcome to my conundrum I have a niche website which is very new. To make it easier to explain i will name it Furniture.com. I plan to add other micro niches to my portfolio of sites which are related to Furniture.com but can operate independently. These micro niches only require a single page. For the best in SEO, SERPS should i: A) Register new domains: sofas.com, chairs.com, tables.com, etc. B) Create subdomains: sofas.furniture.com, chairs.furniture.com, tables.furniture.com, etc. C) Create subfolders: furniture.com/sofas, furniture.com/chairs, furniture.com/tables, etc. Do top level domains rank higher or faster than subdomains / subfolders? Do subfolders need to be promoted individually to acquire the same ranking as a top level domain? Also, because my micro niches only require one page, do web pages have the same authority as subfolders?
All Cheap ways are obviously to create sub domains and make your "single" pages as index pages in their own folders. Either way - that's as sub domains or as folders after, like name.tld/keyword-folder I have two complete mini sites on my kd-mains site in fact take a look (spell this correctly) search K - e- ith D M - a - i - n - s Just take out the hyphens and gaps and write my first name initial and then surname. What you should get is my site with 12 "sitelinks" displaying underneath 2 are a sub domain 2 are mini sites in their own folder a couple are single pages that are not the main site design and the css (styles) are all in the pages meta head. All gte results in their own way and page 1 results to Now I have another site which has absolutely heaps of page 1 SERPS for terms related to those people that draw c -a r toons. I am about to repeat the same wiht terms related to a- r- t ists and ill ustra-tors, car -ic - aturists (apologies for breaking these up I don't want to get found in association here in competition for my search terms if you get my drift There is one site I see that I might only be able to beat RE certain "ill - ustrator" search terms by buying certain domain names that would be directly related to search terms and so then get the added benefit of the "exact match" thing RE the exact match thing I am presently testing that theory with perhaps the hardest search term possible TwitTed Think about it Twitter Twitted (look at you keyboard it's 1 key away) I have the problem that TwitTed is a typo of Twitter irrelevant of whether it is an actual cartoon character it's self see here > http://twitted.co/twitted-tweety-twitter/ My exact match position if not getting recognised by Google etc. Presently suspected to be because of the typo factor and perhaps a couple of other things that I will be experimenting with to see what effects they have However "exact match" search terms do work I know because I can see the only site that I need worry about RE "illus - trator" search terms thta I want has an exact match domain that is merely a logical keyword search made into a domain name. I think you can guess the sort of thing. It would make a better slogan than a name that could be branded if you get my drift. So all the above would be my answer Sprouter Hope that helps?
If you can get the exact match domain (EMD) for the different keywords you will get a EMD boost and these can be fairly easy to rank if its a low-medium level keyword. You can also use these micro niche sites to boost the authority of your main sites. Due to the site structure and not getting the EMD boost they would likely need to be promoted more. Well micro niche sites have less authority then bigger sites, but the promotion you are doing is laser targeted. You are basically only trying to rank for 1 keyword so its usually not difficult even though they don't have as much authority as your main site. But if you were to piggy back off your main site use subfolders and not subdomains.
oh yeah ditto on that one re sub domains as dcristo said as it is said they are treated as different sites (I am not saying they are not btw) which is strange given the new 12 links "sitelinks" thing as I have 2 sub domain links showing amongst my 12 so go figure LOL...