Joel Liu's Library tagged subdomain → View Popular

26 Apr 07

14 Apr 07

The experiment has been a great success. Google seems to fully respect 301 Permanent Redirects and the change has taken my previously split PageRank has been combined and now I am at 7. There are other factors that have contributed to this, of course, and people still continue to link to my site and posts with a www. (or worse) in front of it, but overall it just feels so much cleaner to have one URI for one resource, all the time.

12 Apr 07

99.9% of the time, if a subfolder will work, it's the best choice for all parties. Subfolders have all the flexibility of subdomains (the content CAN, if necessary, be hosted on a unique server or completley unique IP address through post-firewall load balancing) and none of the drawbacks. Subfolder content will contribute directly to how search engines (and users for that matter) view the domain as a whole. The link in to subfolders are considered relevant to the domain as a whole, and while this rule applies for many subdomains, the exceptions make it worth avoiding them.
If your marketing team decides to promote a URL that is completely unique in content or purpose and would like to use a catchy subdomain to do it, it can be practical. Sites like maps.google.com, blog.searchenginewatch.com and even SEOmoz's own web2.0awards.org are examples of wher the marketing considerations make a subdomain an acceptable choice.

Be wary of press and media attention to the domains, as un-savvy users often don't understand the concept of subdomains or that domains can be on the "world-wide-web" without a "www." It's much less expensive to use a subfolder and have slightly less marketing panache than it is to educate through branding and advertising.

Let's say you had a site that had many categories in it. If you were to submit to directories you could submit each subdomain as it's own individual category and not get penalized. The links from the subdomains to the main domain would be looked upon as one way links from another domain.

28 Mar 07