subdomain or not to subdomain?

by jkiley
4 replies
I am starting a new website and would like to know which model I should go with

indianapolis.xyz.com
or
www.xyz.com/indianapolis

Which way is better and why? has anybody done any kind of testing for SEO?

thanks
#subdomain
  • Profile picture of the author Don Warren
    I guess it really depends if you want that subdomain to act as a totally separate site. Although from experience, I believe having a NON subdomain will be better to at least acquire pagerank. Although it shouldn't matter for actual ranking for keywords and what not.
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    • Profile picture of the author OliverBurrell
      Look at amazon.com! They have thousands of keywords and they still use 1 domain, but why? It is not because a huge site "weighs" more - it is because it does not really pay off to have more domains than 1, provided the theme of keywords is the same. If you have a sub-domain you would think because you would have the domain name like [keyword].[domain].com it would rank better but it does not because the SEs see that as a completely different domain and they check if they have the same IP address! To overcome this you would have to register with different hosting companies (you would then get different IPs). This is a lot of work and more cost and it just does not balance out if you just go the easy way of having a sub directory (which has your keywords enclosed). I would go for [www].[my domain with main keywords].com/[my category]/[my product or keyword]. If you want to have this pages ranked at the top of Google you need to provide link juice with keyword rich links to it (high PR). That works best. Hope this answers your question and saves you a lot of work and cost. liver
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  • Profile picture of the author O0o0O
    If your parent domain has lots of authority, then starting out with a subdomain will be beneficial because it gives you a running head start on the competition. On the other hand, if you create a page on the regular domain, it might get indexed faster. So it's best to do more research on the situation.
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