As I mentioned in the article, I would use subdomains for anything that could stand alone as a site itself. If it is just a page (or even up to several pages) worth of content, use a subdirectory.

Subdomains are viewed as different sites. Which can be good because you might target that city more. But it would not really build up the power of the main site unless you do a good job of linking back to it and linking amongst the different sites.

Think of them as standalone sites. The benefit is that I can see country.com in the name so I might be drawn to that and it helps brand that name because I will see london.country.com, newyork.country.com, etc the consistent brand becomes country.com

Beyond that, it really depends on the content you are offering on each. Without knowing and analyzing that, I wouldn’t want to suggest one of these options over the other for anyone.

Should i use

1. http://www.london.com ( a single page which have all links of http://www.country.com/london/computers or
2. whole http://www.london.com/computers)
3. london.country.com
4. http://www.country.com/london

if option 1 will not effect my main website ranking and will improve my ranking then i want to use that but i am too confused about google search.

Another Question is

if i create many different sites and use relevent data on that and i give give them my main website link for mare informations……………………

Please suggest me in too confuse…. both are diffrent questions

My thought on subdomains is usually from a usability standpoint. To me it easiest for people to remember ‘mysite.com/blog’… then ‘blog.mysite.com’. It it kind of losing people once you do ‘mysite.com’ and then ‘mynewsite.com’.

As far as SEO, you can always (and should) do a 301 redirect anyway, so that hopefully none of that built up search engine power is lost. In the case this is done right, it should matter where you go. This is why people buy old domains and redirect them to new things.

Search engines do see each subdomain (even www.) as a separate site and that is why it is recommended to choose either ‘http://www.mysite.com’ or ‘http://mysite.com’ as your preference and direct traffic with a 301 redirect to the correct one. Otherwise you are splitting your incoming links between the people who chose to link to www or non-www.

Subdomains, while attached to the main domain, are also separate and at that point I honestly don’t know what is better. It would be specific to the content and a lot of things.

Using new domains can be a good thing for SEO. Linking between them (as long as it is not spammy) is good. Ideally you would set them up on different IP addresses and that would be even better. Links between sites on the same IP address are a little too obvious.

Again, though, the 301 redirect is key. As long as you do that correctly, all links and page rank should follow though. That is if the site is staying the same. Changes in content, design, even doing something that in the long-term might be a better thing for your site, could cause a short-term drop simply because whatever you were ranking for changed.

Any of these situations could be better than a large site with hidden content that is hard to navigate.

-Marty

Assuming for a second this is duplicate content and a somewhat spammy idea… I have seen plenty of sites that get away with this, at least for a while. But I would assume that they are often short-lived. I know some of the companies that practice this type of thing jump around from domain to domain so if one gets in trouble they are ready to get the next one going and they don’t care. So if you are setting up fake domains like 123plumbing.com and a-plus-los-angeles-plumbers.com then who cares if you get banned, you can make another. Just plan for it. This won’t be a site to last for years.

But if this your branded domain, like myname.com then you want to hold on to that and I would not do anything like what you are describing.

Please don’t get me wrong. I am not advocating this idea, nor saying it is illegal or even a bad business idea. I compare this idea or any spam idea to buying bulk email lists and sending junk email, sending traditional junk mail, or hiring a telemarketing firm to harass people at home by the thousands. It might be worth the money in the end, it might drive business, especially for a bulk driven business that operates across the country.

But it is not legit (to me) and I won’t do sites like that. I personally consider it spam, regardless of whether it is legal, allowed, looked down upon, or whatever.

If I had someone who wanted to get found for locations across the country I would recommend setting Local Business Google listings and Yahoo listings for those locations. Create Yelp listings. And get customers to review you there. More work. Maybe. But if you are getting booted from search listings and redoing this all the time, that’s a lot of work too.

That’s just my take.

There’s an existing line of business that serves cities across the US. I’ll use carpet cleaning as an example. I have been asked to create either a sub domain, sub folders, or separate web pages for each city in the US that would use the carpet cleaning service. Currently competitors are doing the same and have a static html page for every city (30,000+ pages on their site). Customers normally search for city, state and “carpet cleaning” so having a page appear in search rankings that is localized to that city gains a lot of business.

Setting up subdomains for every city would be 30000 sub domains but it is much cleaner since the webserver can serve up dyanmic content based on subdomain instead of cluttering up the webserver with sub folders or lots of pages.

My concern is whether search engines would see this as duplicate content. The content is small and the only duplication is the carpet cleaning terms and description but the localized content for the city is much greater such that zip codes, cities, and local businesses are listed that are provided the service.

I question if google would see this as duplicate content or not. If they saw 30,000+ subdomains, it would certainly lift an eyebrow but seems ligitamate that a service is advertised in a search engine for all the cities it services. I wonder if anyone has taken this approach to create 30,000+ subdomains and whether there would be any performance issues created that were unexpected. Being banned from search engines totally defeats the purpose.

Not sure what your SEO concerns are though. Are you worried about the php / .net or using the subdomain when normally you could have used a subdirectory?

I don’t know that either would influence it all that much. For the most part as long as you have great content and have it on a domain you own (whether it is blog.domain.com or domain.com/blog) and not using a blog.wordpress.com or blog.blogspot.com address you should be set.

Just thought of a new use for subdomain.

Let’s say your company’s hosting only provides for java or .NET and did not support PHP. However, you wanted a WordPress Blog at your domain name. A change to the cname record could point the subdomain blog.company.com to a separate server with PHP.

Hmmm… I wonder if that would affect the SEO though.

What do you think?

-Matt

Don’t make that switch unless you know how to set-up the 301 redirects.

While it would seem to be not a big deal since it is on the same domain, you might as well be deleting your whole site.

Any links to your site will be looking for ‘blog.domain.com/page-title’ but that no longer exists. The same pages might be at ‘domain.com/blog/page-title’ but how would they know? It could be at ‘some-random-new-domain.com’ or it could be gone completely.

The search engines might eventually crawl your site again and find everything, but it would be like creating a new site. Meanwhile, all those links that gave you such great PR are pointing to other URLs – your old site.

As long as you use 301 redirects, the links will all carry over and the search engines will follow as well, removing you old URLS and replacing them with the new ones and, in theory at least, you won’t lose anything.

If you don’t set that up, you risk not only losing all that PR but losing points for a lot of 404 errors for broken links. You will also need to make sure you redirect any RSS feeds you might have had at the subdomain so you don’t lose any subscribers.

If you don’t don’t know how to do any of that, drop me a line.

-Marty