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Wordpress SEO & subdomain question / advise

by XXXXXXXX
5 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I did some searching and read the FAQ area but didn't find an answer to my questions. Maybe I didn't search the right terms. So I thought I would post my questions here.

Ok I am going to try and explain as best as possible what my skill level is and what I "think" I am trying / want to do so...here goes.

First I have a niche that I want to put up wordpress blogs for. Lets say / call it for example the "car" niche. So I have purchased a seasoned domain (2003) that is keyworded to my niche. So lets say the domain is cars.com. I am new to wordpress. I have some WSO's on optimization for wordpress and have put up a wordpress blog or two. I have also played around with subdomains and installing wordpress on them. So here is what I am trying to figure out. I want to have optimized blogs by city. The reason for this is the niche I am in......people will search the niche by city and keyword. So for example people will search for say....Cars in Las Vegas or Cars in San Diego or San Diego Cars or Las Vegas Cars etc. So I am thinking of 2 things.

1) Put up niche blogs individually by city. So maybe I get a domain name such as CarsInSanDiego.com or CarsInLasVegas.com. Each blog would be stand alone with its own domain and optimization. Articles will be duplicate content for all the blogs or cities. (I read in the FAQ that there is no duplicate content penalty for individual site. I will have the expense of a domain for each city or......

2) Use my main domain and then use the subdomain for each blog. So for example have SanDiego.Cars.com or LasVegas.Cars.com and install a blog on each subdomain. The only thing I am worried about here would be google finding each site as having duplicate content for the root domain or does that not apply? This method would also save me the expense of having to buy a domain for each blog. My idea here is similar to how backpage.com does its site. Main page backpage.com then subdomains for each city like lasvegas.backpage.com etc. Plus I think if I put a main page with links to the other pages there are link benefits for that as well right? Or am I way off base here. Looking for some Wordpress and SEO experts to give me their opinions on this.

Also are there any tutorials on how to set up a main blog page that then links to other blog pages?

Any ideas on how best to do this?
I hope this made sense. If not let me know and I will try to clarify.

Thanks for the help!! X
#advise #question #seo #subdomain #wordpress
  • Profile picture of the author XXXXXXXX
    Anyone have any ideas on how I should go about this?

    Thanks X
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  • Profile picture of the author wordpresstrainingpackage
    The answers to your questions have advantages and disadvantages.

    Niche blogs on different subfolders
    You can have all niche blogs on different subfolders. This works best if the main domain represents all the different niche blogs. Hence, each niche blog would be CompanyXDomainname.com/SanDiegoCars, CompanyXDomainname.com/LasVegasCars, etc.

    The good thing about subfolders is that they can inherit the pagerank of the main domain name because the search engines treat them as part of the domain name.

    Niche blogs on Subdomains
    Subdomains have advantages. Subdomains can also enable you save a lot of money on multiple domain names. With subdomains, you can still create multiple websites for different niches on the same domain name. Subdomains are good because each one is treated as a separate domain name and thus your main domain and the subdomain can appear in the same search results more than once.

    The only drawback to subdomains is that they cannot inherit the pagerank of the main domain name CompanyXDomainname.com

    Niche blogs on Separate Domain Names
    Separate domain names could also work for you. The problem is that you may not get good keyword-rich domains for every niche you are interested in. This is what makes a subdomain a good choice. With a subdomain, you can create keyword-rich domains as people search for them in the search engines. If you are lucky, you may get an aged domain for all or some of the other websites you want to create. However, you should take some things into consideration when buying the aged domain:

    - The domain has more than 200 Yahoo Backlinks
    - More than 1 Year Old
    - Have pages in the index of search engines. (preferred but not mandatory)
    - Is not a domain banned by the search engines

    When considering an aged domain, I generally take the points above into consideration.

    Aged domains work very well with jump starting any website you create because they could have thousands of backlinks which could make your site gain popularity in the search engines quickly. Though an expired domain is not a pre-requisite for a money-making website, having one would help you if you are considering establishing the websites on separate domains.

    Duplicate Content
    Of course, the search engines give priority to websites holding the original content. In order to beat this, you need to properly optimize the web pages with the use of good plugins and build high quality backlinks. Taking these steps makes the search engines give you priority above all other pages holding the same content.

    Still on the duplicate content, do not rely solely on them for your main site content. Try to also mix the whole thing with some unique content pages. In doing this, link the unique content pages with the duplicate content pages.

    Doing this boosts the credibility of those duplicate content pages. If you have more duplicate content than unique content, make sure you draw more backlinks to the duplicate content pages.

    Now what happens if you cannot get good backlinks to those duplicate content pages? This is where you need to employ other SEO strategies. What you should do is create multiple blogger blogs. The number of blogs you create depends on the time and effort you want to devote to it. In my own case, I would create about 20 different blogger blogs, all related or unrelated to the main site. The blogger blogs would then be linked to the main site. Do not stop there. You should then create content in some web 2.0 sites like Squido and Hubpages and link them to the blogger blogs. All these steps may seem too hard to do but as you start one you would see they can be done.

    Plugins
    If you cannot go through most of the rigors of backlinking mentioned above, you can do some backlinking and also install some special plugins for each niche blog. The plugins do not rewrite the duplicate content articles. What they do is that they convert them to Hex code and the search engines read those codes and convert to text, believing that the article on your site is original.

    To use these plugins, you need to make sure you first test them on different themes. Some wordpress themes reveal those hex codes to the human eye. A very good them will not reveal any code. Those codes are not meant for the human eye. They are the language of the search engines
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  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
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    • Profile picture of the author Cataclysm1987
      Originally Posted by yukon View Post

      It would be a lot easier If you use categories, instead of sub-domains.

      Example:

      1) www.domain.com/las-vegas/porsche/

      2) www.domain.com/miami/audi/

      3) www.domain.com/houston/bmw/

      4) www.domain.com/denver/mercedes-benz/
      I agree. It makes your installation and site linking structure a LOT easier to set up.

      If you try to set it up using subdomains, you will likely end up needing to spend a lot of extra timing reinstalling your CMS to each of these domains and doing some rather complex database configuration.

      This can get you the same results in terms of SEO but won't give you any huge headaches.
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  • Profile picture of the author scott g
    Originally Posted by XXXXXXXX View Post

    2) Use my main domain and then use the subdomain for each blog. So for example have SanDiego.Cars.com or LasVegas.Cars.com and install a blog on each subdomain. The only thing I am worried about here would be google finding each site as having duplicate content for the root domain or does that not apply? This method would also save me the expense of having to buy a domain for each blog. My idea here is similar to how backpage.com does its site. Main page backpage.com then subdomains for each city like lasvegas.backpage.com etc. Plus I think if I put a main page with links to the other pages there are link benefits for that as well right? Or am I way off base here. Looking for some Wordpress and SEO experts to give me their opinions on this.

    I'm actually doing this right now for a new site I'm working on. I've got the mainkeyword.com and then I slap on some modifiers (subdomains) to target a longer tail keyword, which also gives me an EMD.

    My TLD is wordpress. The subdomains are static HtML/CSS. I have Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools for each subdomain (and the TLD). No problems what-so-ever. Google looks at subdomains their own, completely unique domain...

    No problemo. Hope this helps you a little. Any questions just ask!

    I agree with the other guys though, too. Adding a new directory to target other keywords would be just as easy. The main reason I went with subdomains is simply b/c I wanted to have wordpress on the main and have HTML static pages to build and optimize - I'm better with HTML than PHP :p

    OH... and I got really lucky with a good domain that I could add subdomains to to make exact match domains for each keyword the subdomains are targeting.

    CHEERS!
    Signature
    scott g
    "Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve."
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