Topic Sub domains and SEO

Donkey

Are they good or bad, I cant recall. I would love to hear others thoughts on this....

Like for instance with forums, say your site isn't meant to be all forums (or even if it is) should use a sub domain for your boards like "forum.xyzabc.com"?

I'm thinking it cant hurt since well since it is a more professional organized way to run a site...

Then again I could be wrong

I will eagerly wait your replies

-edit

I am seeing from my own research that many times a SE will see a sub domain as a completely independent site if you structure it that way. This being said the argument of if your site is going to aesthetically stay the same you should just use sub directories but if your site is going to change use sub domains. Now A sub domain is basically just a sub folder on your main directory with a cgi-bin for example. since you can access and sub domain by just using the folder (e.g. sub.domain.com/ can be found at domain.com/sub/).

So how does one decide to implement sub domains and what SEO benefits would they receive by doing it that way. I still think it would be a good way to organize your site.

Interesting discussion
http://www.searchengineforums.com/ap...d::1167440066/

-HAL-

That was what I had planned to answer you yesterday as well, but I didn't have time..

Sub domains is, as you say, a good way to organize your site, and by using sub domains you can also place your forum etc. on a separate server (to balance the server load) since you can just point the sub domain to it.

But a (major) disadvantage by using sub domains is the same thing; it's regarded as a separate site..

Search engines do look at the amount of pages you have indexed, and tends to rank sites with lots of content/pages higher than smaller sites.
And by keeping you forum on the same domain (not using a sub domain) you create a lot more pages on your main site and you may rank better because of that.
Another disadvantage by creating a new (sub) domain is that search engines tends to rank older established sites better than new ones, so you may end up in the Google "sandbox" for many months on your newly created sub domain and have to "work your way up" the SERPs.
That may take a long time compared to just creating a new forum folder on your main (established) domain...

Hope this answers your question..

Donkey

It is almost like one should wait off on using sub domains until their site is established. Once that has occurred you could restructure your site breaking things up like forums and what not into sub domains. However if you have sections of your site you want to be distinctively different from each other you would then want to start off right form the beginning with a sub domain.

So a good example of what not to do for a new site would be to make a news.domain.com Since all your content would be on the news sub domain doing no good for your main site.

-HAL-

I wouldn't move anyting into subdomains after a site has become established and well indexed in the search engines since that will remove the content from your main site, and you will loose pages and quite possible also ranking in the SERPs...

Moving content to sub-domains or other domains/site is almost never a good idea, so if you have completely different content you'll want to put on sub-domains or if you have parts you want to put on another server (using sub-domains) then you should do it from the beginning.


I personally almost never use sub-domains for anything...