Subdomains and folders: the best of both worlds

[almer]

Hello,

I've tried to read as much as I could here about subdomains vs folders and decided I want both. I would desperatly like to hear if this is a good idea or not?

My plan is to launch a website where I can give starting artist a place to show what they do. I live in a town that is famous for its jewelery and every year dozens of students graduate from this very unique "silversmithing" school.

With subdomains I could give them each their own page, login and e-mail. But I read about the drawbacks as well. Like every subdomain has to wait for DNS report propogation(?) and the ranking isn't easy.
But if I alais them and build the site with the subdomains as folders I could rank better. If it is okay with the big G anyway.

I was thinking along this line.
main domain: ww.kettingreactie.nl (meaning: chainreaction as in reacting to a chain as in jewelery.. It probably sounds better in Dutch anyway).

subdomains: artistname.kettinreactie.nl
Giving each artist their own login and email. This would also be the url for them to put on cards etc.

website structure:
ww.kettingreactie.nl/home
ww.kettingreactie.nl/artistname1
ww.kettingreactie.nl/artistname2

Could this work for SEO? Or would I be spamming?

Help me out please? I would be wasting a lot of time and money betting on the wrong horse.

Sincerely yours from beautiful Schoonhoven.

-Almer-

[incrediblehelp]

I dont think this would be spamming, as long as you dont create a bunch of fake artist pages.

MySpace.com basically does the same thing for every teenager in the world

[ebusiness4all]

almer: For clarity could you confirm ...

would the page on the subdomain artistname1.kettinreactie.nl

and the first page in the subdirectory
ww.kettingreactie.nl/artistname1


have the same or different content?

[almer]

Yes ebusiness4all,

They would be 100% identical. The folder version would be an alias of the third level root version.

And thanks incrediblehelp, I'll look into this Myspace thing.

Sincerely yours,

-Almer-

[incrediblehelp]

Yes ebusiness4all,

They would be 100% identical. The folder version would be an alias of the third level root version.

And thanks incrediblehelp, I'll look into this Myspace thing.

Sincerely yours,

-Almer-

Maybe I missed something then. What is the purpose of having the same content under the sub and under the folder? Why not just block one from the spiders using your robots.txt file?

[almer]

thanks for stating the obvious incrediblehelp.

I always wondered why someone wouldn't want a page indexed and this is ofcourse one of those reasons.

I'll ask my webhost right away if he can fix it like that.

cheers
Almer