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Of silos and subdomains. My crazy question of the day

by Blaine Smitley
5 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I’ve researched this till I’m blue in the face, and am at a point of information overload and can’t figure out which way to go.

Here’s the situation.

After a year of hard effort I’ve built one 30 page site around a given niche that is a problem solving product/service combination and am doing well with it.

This site generates leads and I sell them, in effect making me a middle man.

Everything that I’ve done SEO wise on this site targets one city and the product/service combination that is my niche.

I would like to go on a rampage with it, and ultimately do 10 more major cities around the nation. In effect scaling up my operation and resulting income.

Admittedly my web design and seo skills are limited so if my question/questions appear ignorant then I apologize in advance.

A little more background.. My current site didn’t start to rank well until it got some size to it. Each page is built and SEO’d to catch a long tail key phrase that a person would potentially type in while looking to solve this major problem that this product/service combination solves. 90% of these key phrases contain the name of my city or another type of geo specific associated phrase.

This product/service combination cannot be shipped and has about a 30 mile radius that people (customers) are limited to. In other words, it’s very geo specific.

So here’s my first question.

Due to the geo specific searching habits associated with this niche, and my wanting to go national with this product/service problem solving solution. Should I buy one keyword rich domain and build subdomains for each city?

Or build the one keyword rich domain and use sub folders for each city?

Keeping in mind that either way I want to silo everything either way I go.

Example 1: Subdomains.

Indianapolis.domainname.com
nashville.domainname.com
atlant.domainname.com

OR

Example2: Sub Directories

domainname.com/indianapolis
domainname.com/nashville
domainname.com/atlanta

There are a lot of reasons I’m considering subdomains over subdirectories.

Chiefly I don’t think that just a few city specific pages for each city will compete their way into the top serps and generate the leads I need.

All of the money associated with this niche seems to be in the top 3 organic spots. Also I’ve read where it’s no harder to rank a subdomain than it is a regular domain. I wonder is this true? I see the big sites doing it and making it work.

Here’s my second question.

Does anybody know of a resource? Tutorials? Have personal experience with? Doing what I’m suggesting.

Like I mentioned earlier I’ve searched the forums here and read until I’m blue in the face about doing this. I’ve googled it every way possible and can’t find much of anything about it. There are some tid bits out there but very little real information.

And last but not least..

Am I so far out on the crazy limb that it’s time to saw it off, and just forget the whole thing?
#crazy #day #question #silos #subdomains
  • Profile picture of the author SEODollz
    Here is just my humble opinion on this: I'd go with subdirectories just because Google is not really good at digesting subdomains. They typically get indexed as if they were separate sites so basically you are chopping what would be a nice sized "authority" type site into lots of littler sites. I see this with clients that put their blog on a subdomain often. Their blog will start outranking their main site and why not? Lots of fresh content, incoming links etc but none of that is benefiting the main site except for maybe a "home" link on the subdomain that can pass juice. It's like a partition whereas a wel structured site with subdirectories is receiving the benefit of all of it's indexed pages. HTH
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    • Profile picture of the author nik0
      Banned
      I totally agree with what SEOdollz said.

      Sub domains are imo treated as domains that stand on their self and thus you can't leech authority from the main domain, except for perhaps a common navigation bar same like toptenreviews does or links from one sub domain to the other but that's not really riding on the main sites authority, it's just a back link.

      Why might sub domains be a better choice for toptenreviews and not for you? Simple, they cover tons of different products and you only cover different cities but all for the same service, so in case of toptenreviews it would kind of kill their relevancy a bit and thus they use sub domains while if you build out each city properly you only increase the relevance/authority of the site.

      Do make sure you have something unique to add, otherwise it will look just like a collection of almost spun content and Panda ain't too happy about that. Sure it might not be spun but there are only so many ways to describe a service that it can easily be confused for spun.
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    • Profile picture of the author nik0
      Banned
      Originally Posted by SEODollz View Post

      I see this with clients that put their blog on a subdomain often. Their blog will start outranking their main site and why not? Lots of fresh content, incoming links etc but none of that is benefiting the main site except for maybe a "home" link on the subdomain that can pass juice. It's like a partition whereas a wel structured site with subdirectories is receiving the benefit of all of it's indexed pages. HTH
      Lately I had that too, the client says, you tell me to add content to get rid of the thin image and now I've been publishing for months and nothing changed.

      I take a look and yes all published on a sub domain.
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  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    From what I've read in OP there's no chance that any of the sub-domains will be competing with each other, they're all GEO specific. A domain targeting Houston, TX won't easily show up for Miami, FL in the SERPs.

    OP is currently ranking for a single GEO location. Is that an EMD for a single city (ex: miami-auto-sales.com), or is it a generic domain name that can be used for any city (ex: auto-sales.com)? If your current root domain is GEO specific for a single city, it's going to look silly targeting additional cities (houston.miami-auto-sales.com).

    Sub-domains will rank the same as a root domain, there's no difference as far as SEO goes.

    For the folks above with client sub-domain blogs outranking their money pages, your not passing authority in the right direction. All you have to do is rank the sub-domain page for your keyword, then go back to the sub-domain (blog) page that's ranked & remove all traces of the [exact] keyword from the blog page except for the keyword anchor-text on a link pointing at your root domain money page. If you do this right you'll pass the authority from the blog page in the correct direction to the money page.

    This is how I swapped out a ranked index page with an internal money page that included a video thumbnail image to boost SERP CTR. It's basically hidden authority.

    Use that client blog to it's full potential.

    [edit]
    One more thing about client blogs. You should also be selling on the blog, at least banners/links promoting the root domain money pages.
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    • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
      I agree that folders versus subdomains are the way to go. I do not believe that Google fully treats subdomains like a brand new domain as they claim, they certainly do not get the full benefit of the authority of the root domain.

      Big mistake I see many sites make is they add a drop down menu to the navigation bar with all the cities they are targeting. I would avoid this. You add in 20+ links to the navigation bar and you are weakening all your internal links throughout the site. You could add something like a "Service Areas" link that has a separate page with links to each city page.
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