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Subdomain or Directory?

by Asher
10 replies
Hi Warriors,

I've been going through some more materials that I got my hands on and I need some advice.

Will be starting into niche blogging/affiliate promotion.

Would it be recommended to use a subdomain or a directory for something like that?

I'm kind of stuck in the middle because I've read that subdomains don't get indexed as much nor as quickly - however, if I use directories, I think the URL might get too long!

What do you suggest?

Asher
#directory #subdomain
  • Profile picture of the author VinceNouvel
    I would say to utilize both of them. I find it to be more effective. Oh yeah depend on what you are after..
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    • Profile picture of the author Asher
      Utilizing both would be very confusing to me - not to mention the risk of duplicate content which can affect search engines, doesn't it?
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      Asher Aw
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      • Profile picture of the author lakshaybehl
        I think the best bet would be to create a directory AND a subdomain pointing to that directory. That's what Vince meant...
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        • Profile picture of the author Asher
          Hmm, excuse my ignorance - I'm still pretty much on learning curve. Do you mean something like:

          product.domain.com is the same as domain.com/product ?

          Asher
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          Asher Aw
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          • Profile picture of the author Ben Roy
            I'm relatively sure that most of the search engines consider:

            product1.domain.com
            product2.domain.com

            to be separate websites while

            domain.com/product1
            domain.com/product2

            can be viewed as one website. If you're just using them for landing pages, it doesn't matter much. If you are concerned with search rankings and organic traffic at all, you would probably want to steer towards the latter.
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          • Profile picture of the author Ross Dalangin
            Originally Posted by neonerai View Post

            Hmm, excuse my ignorance - I'm still pretty much on learning curve. Do you mean something like:

            product.domain.com is the same as domain.com/product ?

            Asher
            If you have a server with addon domain capability then it is the same content and no need to redirect it. If your domain is just an addon then your subdomain.yourdomain.com will be the same as subdomain.yourmaindomain.com and yourmaindomain.com/demo.

            My example is this demo.reviewsscript.com is an addon domain of frienddrive.com (my main account) and when I create that it creates demo.frienddrive.com and frienddrive.com/demo and to maximize it you can add a folder like reviewsscript.com/demo and point it to demo.reviewscript.com. I didn't use it because my reviewsscript.com is an addon.

            So if you create a subdomain for your main domain like mine as frienddrive.com you can create demo.frienddrive.com and frienddrive.com/demo with the same content.

            It would look difficult at this but try to create one and check what folder in your file manager it creates, you'll understand it.
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            • Profile picture of the author wahdude316
              Hey y'all!

              I just read this thread and three others that came up in a search. I still don't really get the pros/cons of using a subdomain vs directory.

              I'd like to have sort of niche pages, with real content, that might contain affil links and/or Adsense. When would I want my individual niche pages to be considered as part of the main site, and when would I want them to be seen as separate domains?

              I hope I asked that right!

              Thanks in advance,

              Mr. G
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              • Profile picture of the author psresearch
                Matt Cutts discussed this a while back:

                Subdomains and subdirectories

                As he mentions there, it seems like nowadays you're better of reserving subdomains for specific services of your site like news, video, mail, etc. although I doubt that's a hard and fast rule (whatever is with Google?)

                One of the problems in the past was that the same site could rank multiple times for the same keyword by using multiple subdomains targeting that keyword.

                I think (not sure) that's when Google started giving some preference to directories over subdomains. Of course, ideally, you'd still want the directories to be topically related to an overall theme.
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  • Profile picture of the author Business-Cards.com
    I would use a subdomain as well
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  • Profile picture of the author KimBeckers
    I agree, I would use a subdomain as well, I have had better luck with them as opposed to a subdirectory.
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