Does anyone know whether it makes any difference to search engines whether the subdomains are done as www.mydomain.ca/xyz/ or www.xyz.mydomain.ca?

I dont think their is much a of difference at all. You may hear some say subdomains are better because they may be consider a "new" domain, but in the long run both options need some great backlinks and content.

Choose whichever is best and easiest for your developers to work in.

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In the Domain Name System (DNS) hierarchy, a subdomain is a domain that is part of a larger domain. If you want to use subdomains, they can be effective when you want to separate the site features, like blogs, forums, etc.

For all other cases, I recommend using subdirectories.

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Though I personally haven't seen it make much of a difference, I have heard some say some SE's look at which side of the domain the keyword appears, to determine whether it's truly relevant to that keyword or just a side note page. If it makes any difference at all though, I can't imagine it being much.

The important thing is whichever you go with, make sure to be consistent with linking, so that all links either point to subject.example.com or example.com/subject. Definitely not both.

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I have to agree. Google will follow the links from your entry page, and see that you have a lot of duplicate content on your site. They will penialize you seriously for that.

Use sub-dirs.

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http://MADEinUSA.org and others.

Thanks, everyone.

Jrb: It sounds like using a subdomain creates duplicate content. How does that happen?

Mike and Beth

If I have a domain - http://www.mysite.com and also have http://mysite.com, and they both go to the same page, is is a duplicate. Same goes for http://mysite.com/goodies being the same page as http://goodies.mysite.com and http://www.mysite/goodies are all the same pages? then you have more than just duplicate content, you have multiple duplicate content.

If the links on the pages all go to the same internal content, then it looks like duplicate internal site content, in addition to possible duplicate page content.

I bought .com .net .org .info to protect my domain and foolishly pointed them to the same home page. I went from #7 in google to #185 almost immediately.

Don't do it. Duplicate content is the biggest/quickest downer you can get. That is why all the fuss over sending your http://mysite.com with a 301 to http://www.mysite.com - same thing.

Unfortunately the spiders cant figure this out and realize they aren't duplicates, just different paths to the same page for virsatility.

For some silly reason, Google doesn't want to realize this, like clicking on your own asSense should just not count. Instead, they just ban your site totally! And without warning.

He who has the gold rules....

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http://MADEinUSA.org and others.

Thanks, jrb. I guess you mean if you do both www.mysite.ca/xyz/ and www.xyz.mysite.ca. it's treated as duplicate content. I guess we'll stick with subfolders.

Thanks everyone.

No, that would not be, one is the home page, the other is the /xyz subpage.

xyz.mysite.ca/ and www.mysite.ca/xyz/
(if it lands you on the same page)
would be treated as duplicate content.

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http://MADEinUSA.org and others.

Thanks Jrb!