Sub-domain Question...

[RISTMO]

Hi,

Sorry to post this if this has already been asked, but I am really tight on time right now and don't have enough to check and see if it was asked.

Are there any benefits to using subdomains instead of folders on a website? Like say http://www.music.arabchurch.com/ instead of http://www.arabchurch.com/music/? How do sub-domains work with PR? Does Google treat them each as individual sites, each having their own ranking? Or does each of the subdomains have a "base" ranking of that of the site itself (www.arabchurch.com/, in this case) that can be raised or lowered based on the popularity of the subdomain? Or? And what about for multiple results? I think I remember seeing results in the past where one site had multiple top ten rankings because it had different subdomains with relevant content...Is it really possible to have 10 different subdomains that each rank top ten, thereby driving out all other competition? Or are all the subdomains somehow linked to the main site and limited to a total of 2 (or 3 or whatever today's limit is ;-)) of rankings per main site?

Thanks!

Rick

[mediahound]

ooohhh

I just posted the same question (http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?p=50588#505880), and when I went to view it, I found this post.
*Very interesting.
Those of you that reply to this thread, please also participate in my poll in the above link.
Cheers.

[dmcgill]

Hi,
I am not really sure I understand your question.
I will give you my opinion on what I think you asked and if that doesn't confuse you... lol well...

When you create your site, your first page will be called index. It will appear in the address bar of your browser as "example" http://www.yourdomain.com
Any page after that will look like http://www.yourdomain.com/page.html
I don't know what other developers call that but I call it a linked page and it is spidered as part of your site when you get a visit from googlbot or any other search engine spider.
In order to create a "sub-domain", (at least what I call a sub-domain is by creating a brand new virtual domain on your server. In this sub-domain you would upload a completely new site. The address would appear, http://www.yourdomain.com/newsite/ All Linked pages on that sub-domain would appear: http://www.yourdomain.com/newsite/pages
As to being listed, Google will list some of your linked pages if they have unique subject matter in them with unique keywords. As to the subdomains, they will link it as a separate site all together.

Not sure if that will help you but there is really no advantage at all (in my opinion) or disadvantage. I think it is a matter of preference.
Dmcgill

[diblik]

In answer to your question Yes, the subdomains can dominate a search but sites built in subdirectories usually do not. The down side is that because it is treated as seperate, you end up with less pages/content, so you would loose on that factor.

I wouldn't try to dominate the serps unless it is a totally generic phrase like "do it yourself"

Then your subdomains would relate to different types auto, home.....

If you will have so much content on each subdomain I would go that route, but if not, then one site logically organized. You can always split out later (if your hoster allows)

[Conficio]

Hi DMCGill,
I'd call what you describe to be a page and a folder.

A domain is something that the Domain Name Service (DNS) is involved with such as www.example.com (where example.con is the domain as in webmaster@example.com and www is the host). A subdomain would be www.first.example.com, but first.example.com would do the trick - formally another host on the domain example.com (and is shorter to type).

Everything that has an extension in your file system (is a file) should be a page (or if it is a script - a dynamic page). The complete path to that page as it appears in your browser is referred to as the URL. Your pages can be grouped in folders such as www.example.com/myfolder/page.html.

Search engines do consider each page individually. Google calls it "Page Rank" for a reason. You should see the Rank change for every page in your web-site.

The tricky part is to define a site. In my understanding it is a logical structure, that can be defined by ownership, coherence etc. It can be spread over many pages, many folders, even many servers (like your bank has special servers to do the online banking vs. the informational pages; Many sites actually serve advertisement from different servers in the same page). It also is common to have many sites on the same server such as home.comcast.net/~conficio and home.comcast.net/~weltladen-lienz.

My guess is that search engines don't care that much about the site at all. They look at each page individually and look at it's link structure to determine the page rank. But in the results of google you see the indented entries (always one as a sub-entry to a main entry). There the domain and or the folder structure comes into play. Google (and many others) aggregate results to these groups in order to not have 20 pages from the same source (site/author team) and give the user more variety in the results. I guess they simply look at the common part of the URL from the left to determine the grouping.

For the grouping effect it does not matter if you choose sub-domains or folders.

The common wisdom says that keywords in the url do matter such as www.mydomain.com/keyword/anotherkeyword.html or keyword.mydomain.com/key_word_phrase.html. I don't see any logical reason why ranking algorithms should rank any of those higher than the other. But you never know. I'd think the difference would be minimal. Having keywords in the URL should do the trick in general.

I started another thread some time ago about the scope of a site (http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=7770&highlight=scope). The discussion there might be of interest to you.

Seasonal greetings
K<o>

[RISTMO]

Thanks everyone. Very interesting. So what would you recommend with the site that I'm re-doing? It will have sheet music for 800 songs by the new year, and it will eventually have guitar chords / lyrics and audio files for those same 800 songs. The thing is, I already rank #5 for "arabic sheet music" (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=arabic+sheet+music), and by the time the rest of the songs are added, I should easily be #1 for that phrase. So is it really even worthwhile to seperate that and have it as a stand-alone website or should I keep it as a sub-directory of the Arab Church website hoping that the extra 800-2400 pages would help get me the top ranking for "Arab" or "Arabic" that I've been envying for a while? It would seem strange to have music.arabchurch.com when everything else was arabchurch.com/dir/....but the content is pretty different. I'm going to have radio, dramas, music, message boards, teaching resources, and maybe even news and stuff once I get the site itself up and running. So the site will be very diverse...And if I link to each subdomain from the header of each page on each subdomain and main site, might that not count as more to have 5-6 "different" sites linking to each other than 5-6 directories on the same site? Doesn't Google give an external link more weight than an internal one?

I'm just asking all this stuff right now, since the new template is done, and I'm about ready to start uploading content...so now's the perfect time to change the site's structure if I'm going to do it at all.

Thanks everyone!

Rick

P.S. Yeah, I hear what you're saying about individual pages being ranked independantly, it just seems that it's usually the directories with the highest rankings (since the index.php page in those directories have the most in-links).

[Conficio]

Hi Ristmo,
your questions are quite interesting. But the answer should be considered in light of generic marketing, rather than SEO alone.

The underlying question is one of branding. Do you want the music venture be seen as an independent brand or is it part of the church activities. In other words do you want people think of the music “site” as a great music resource or as a great church that cares about the music?

If you want to separate them and view them as independent, I'd even plan a separate domain. They are less than $10/year these days, so it should not necessarily be prohibitive.

Be careful with the proposed scheme of linking from many pages on the church to many pages in the music site. In my opinion a site is only constituted by a strong cohesion (many links) among many pages (and usually similar domains for the URL-root). But it can span servers and folders and even domains. Therefore if you link schematically from each page of the church to the music and vice versa, you basically make it one site.

If you want two separate sites (two entries in a search result), you got to achieve weak cohesion. For example have in the music site link from every page to an about page and from there you link to the church (one link). On the church site you link form an affiliation page to the home page of the music site. A few (may be a 10 -15) links from (music-)topical pages from the church site to particular music pieces (because they have been performed by the quire for example) should be beneficial and of no harm (That is what is called deep-linking, as opposed to linking to the home page of a site).

The beauty is, you don't have to make that decision between sub-domain and the folder structure permanent. But if you start under the church now, make sure you will honor the links and URLs in the future (don't delete any page ever on your web-server, always replace with a redirect to a new page or the home page or some search page), to preserve old links on other sites and in the search engines.

After that spend your time to get as many other sites as possible to link to you in a natural fashion (content – content). Don't forget forums and news groups.

Have fun
K<o>
P.S.: I think it would beneficial if you try to get the domain arab_church.com (and/or arab_music and/or arab_sheet_music) – because it allows the search engine to see the two words “arab” and “church”. That should improve your chances to be on top of “arab”. Also #1 or #4 doesn't matter (other than to the personal pride). What matters is page #1 or page #2 on the results, because folks don't page very far.

[Conficio]

P.S.: I think it would beneficial if you try to get the domain arab_church.com (and/or arab_music and/or arab_sheet_music) – because it allows the search engine to see the two words “arab” and “church”. That should improve your chances to be on top of “arab”. Also #1 or #4 doesn't matter (other than to the personal pride). What matters is page #1 or page #2 on the results, because folks don't page very far.

I need to correct myself Google does see different words in arab-music.com, rather than arab_music.com (dash instead of underscore).

Sorry
K<o>

[YogiDeGr8]

Sub domains have much better search engine value than sub directories.

Each sub domain is treeted as a different site at google.

try to search in google "Silver Jewelry Jaipur"

See my sub domains for site http://www.shauryainternational.com

:) dose any one needs more explainations... :)

[Nargule]

When you create your site, your first page will be called index. It will appear in the address bar of your browser as "example" http://www.yourdomain.com
Any page after that will look like http://www.yourdomain.com/page.html
I don't know what other developers call that but I call it a linked page and it is spidered as part of your site when you get a visit from googlbot or any other search engine spider.
In order to create a "sub-domain", (at least what I call a sub-domain is by creating a brand new virtual domain on your server. In this sub-domain you would upload a completely new site. The address would appear, http://www.yourdomain.com/newsite/ All Linked pages on that sub-domain would appear: http://www.yourdomain.com/newsite/pages

Thats not even close to being a sub-domain. In your example, "/newsite/" is nothing more than a folder on your site. Whether I have "www.mydomain.com/thispage.html" or "www.mydomain.com/thispage/" is of no consequence.

Now for the example "thispage.mydomain.com", "thispage" is a hostname which may or maynot point to a different ip address. This is what people cal a sub-domain. It all depends on how I set up my DNS zone.

Want the best of both worlds? (at least as best as I can think of) Have "www.mydomain.com/thispage/" and make a virtual host "thispage.mydomain.com" that points to it. That way, you could submit or give out either one. Not a perfect solution but perhaps a good way to find out which works best.