You certainly can have more than one blog on a domain. I would use subdomains (niche1.genericdomain.com) instead of sub directories. As to whether the search engines like them, there are various opinions on that. I can only speak from personal experience. I do get search engine traffic on sub domains but I get more by driving traffic to them.

It is possible, but it depends on why you would want to do that. Typically subdomains or multiple blogs are used as a means of building another section off a main site. i.e. If you have a technology blog but have enough to warrant another section/site on Apple products a subdomain would be good.

Think of Yahoo or Google:
- local.yahoo.com
- travel.yahoo.com
- finance.yahoo.com
- maps.google.com
- analytics.google.com

They're all building off the main domain but have enough content or uniqueness that deserves a separate site.

Nothing wrong with search engines here.

but...

I would do this only if every blog is related to each other or just to test something temporarily.

In the long run it is better for seo (and PPC for that matter) to NOT let Google wonder too much about what your main domain actually is all about...

If Google sees too many different subjects being covered on the same main domain, it will not really help your rankings or PPC quality score.

Subdomains will be good Choise, But the OWN domain is More then subdomains

Use a sub domain, then point a domain to that sub-domain. REMEMBER to disallow search engine bots to index that sub domain thru your main domain in a robots.txt file! They need to find it by the domain you point to it (otherwise it has the same IP. Same IP and they will not consider it a different site.)

Hosts like GoDaddy and several others are automatically set up that a subdomain when accessed thru a new domain name pointed to it will have a new IP address and as far as a search engine is concerned may as well be on a separate server...they have no way to tell, if you disallowed access in you robots.txt file on the base domain. Some hosts make you buy a dedicated IP to differentiate the domains with different IPs. To find out, check the IPs on your FTP application and make sure the 3rd of 4 groups of numbers is different. (In most cases all the numbers will be different, if they are not, you need to purchase IPs or use a host that does it automatically).

PR is by page and has no bearing on the issue, really

Adam,

I'm not a SEO specialist, but there are several points to keep in mind while deciding to use subdomains versus separate domains as a business practice.

- Site load - If your sites start growing in size and traffic, it's easier to spread the load by moving one or more domains to a different server than moving just some subdomains. Both can be done from a technical point of view, but moving full domains is easier.

- Banning - This issue is also encountered with shared hosting. If a site is banned by IP, all sites that share the same IP are also affected.

- Selling sites or transferring ownership - If later you decide to sell a site, having it on a subdomain ties the buyer to you since you as the domain holder control the DNS settings for the entire domain. If each site is on a separate domain, you'll transfer ownership of the domain as part of the sale.

Sincerely,
Catalin Ionescu

You can use this plug-in to manage multiple WP installs wherever they are or the MU version: Manage Multiple Blogs from a Single Blog - Wordpress Plugin

(You have good points, Cat, why having different IPs and domain names is good, even if it is on a sub-domain.)

You can do it, but why? There's a hell of a lot of time and effort trying to set and run each installation, and it won't really affect your SEO that much to be worth all that EFFORT

I personally have used subdomains for my websites before. When I created websites I would have subdomains that would have wordpress templates on them and I would promote the subdomain of the website rather than the website itself. Since Google likes wordpress blogs it made sense to promote the subdomain rather than the website. Of course if they both were wordpress blogs that would be just as good too.

If you can afford it, get a separate domain for each of your sites. Not only will it help in your SEO efforts, but as a previous poster pointed out, if you decide to flip, you'll have the flip the whole lot, because you can't parcel out just one subdomain to sell.

Adam I did this on a community site to segment off particular topics and it works extremely well to keep your visitors focused on a topic, and from a SEO point of view i found it a killer way to rank well

Make your sub-domains or folders be related to the main site.

Ross

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