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What's the straight story on subdomains?

by Joel Young
8 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I did a forum search and found some posts about subdomains, but nothing concrete enough to make me feel comfortable about them. Then I Googled, and found old information, i.e. pre-Panda, so that didn't help.

A niche that I want to get into has all the good EMDs taken, and since I already own a domain I'm wondering if I can use the keywords I want for a subdomain, without falling off the rocky cliffs of Google. I'd set it up like this: http://widgets.mydomain.com

Any advice would be appreciated.
#story #straight #subdomains
  • Profile picture of the author Nelapsi
    Everything I have read (never touched it first hand yet) subdomains are treated like directories/folders
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  • Profile picture of the author retsek
    Exact Match is not as powerful as it once was. No need to go out of your way to get it. Even if you do the subdomains, it wouldn't be exact match.

    IMO, sub-domains should be used to separate different types of content. Post-Panda that means things like forums, wikis and other user-generated content should ideally be a subdomain of the main domain. Or you use subdomains to separate different topics in the same niche e.g Healthcare jobs --> subdomains could be doctors, nurses, pharmacists, etc.
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  • Profile picture of the author Joel Young
    Thank you, retsek, that's very helpful information!
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  • Profile picture of the author Jubu
    I'll second what retsek said. I've always found it harder to rank subdomains. As long as your content is related to the keywords you're trying to rank for you'll be fine.
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    • Profile picture of the author cooler1
      Originally Posted by Jubu View Post

      I'll second what retsek said. I've always found it harder to rank subdomains. As long as your content is related to the keywords you're trying to rank for you'll be fine.
      So are sub domains given less weight due to the fact they are sub domains or does it depends on whether the content of the sub domain is related to the content on the main domain i.e. they are both the same niche.
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  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    A sub-domain ranks just as easily as any other page, there's nothing different about them.

    Wikipedia anyone?
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    • Profile picture of the author cooler1
      Originally Posted by yukon View Post

      A sub-domain ranks just as easily as any other page, there's nothing different about them.

      Wikipedia anyone?
      How about if the content is on an entirely different topic from the other subdomains, does that make no difference?
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      • Profile picture of the author yukon
        Banned
        Originally Posted by cooler1 View Post

        How about if the content is on an entirely different topic from the other subdomains, does that make no difference?
        Doesn't matter, it's still an HTML page.

        The only reason I could justify using sub-domains is If I had a lot of content to fill up each unique sub-domain subject.

        Notice all the sub-domains in the same niche (link/image below), the thing is, they each have a few thousand pages. I would imagine they have so many sub-domains to make it easier to manage content.

        Instead of having a site with 500k pages on a single TLD, they have sub-domains with maybe 3,000 pages (easier to manage & keep focused).

        Example source: About.com Autos

        All sub-domains in screenshot below (link above).



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