Sub domains? are they worth using?

From my understanding, subdomains are “specific file cabinets” for your site. For your site, it sounds like you’re seperating out based on game of choice, which will allow you to get more specific backlinks if you chose to do so. Additionally, the user is at an advantage, as they “know” where to go to look for info.

Additionally, if you were targeting say the UK, USA, and Germany, you can set each subdomain to target such audience in Google Webmaster tools.

The only “disadvantage” i see is that google almost considers subdomains as seperate sites from your main website. Though, in knowing this, one can be certain to use that to their advantage as well as put meaningful content on each area of the domain.

Mike

Hi friend, I think subdomains are great. Its like having sections for the different products that are separated by the dubdomain, its easier to organize your content and everything else, I also think I will use subdomains, definately it will bring you more traffic.

Subdomains are treated as separate domains by Google. Which means they need to rank and gain authority on their own. I highly recommend using sub-folders off the root. This will help with depth of content and link equity across the domian itself. Subdomains are appropriate when the content is not related to each other or when you plan on having a ton of pages/content to populate with for each of those sections. Depth of content and search friendly architecture is important to SEO.

Some operators need to use subdomains, because they are separately hosted applications that cannot be integrated into the rest of their offerings. Others use them because they believe their is a specific SEO benefit from subdomains … I do not.

@Simoneaton if you want to layout some specific examples of what you are looking to do, I can give some more targeted advice

thanks
scott polk

Hi, I disagree with you, subdomains are not treated like separate domains, also they don’t need to gain trust, google knows that the subdomains are part of the main site, but different people have different thinking, the best decision is whatever works well for you.

True the choice is yours, but I still do not recommend subdomains when the comment is similar and can be directly related to each other. There are many benefits outside of the “subdomain” issue, such as: depth of content, immediate authority granted from the main domain, and ease of ranking pages of the site. Most SEO experts out there will agree that sub-directories are a better way to go, but there is always an exception to the rule.

From Matt Cutts – http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/ “For several years Google has used something called “host crowding,” which means that Google will show up to two results from each hostname/subdomain of a domain name. That approach works very well to show 1-2 results from a subdomain, but we did hear complaints that for some types of searches (e.g. esoteric or long-tail searches), Google could return a search page with lots of results all from one domain. In the last few weeks we changed our algorithms to make that less likely to happen in the future.”

Google stated at PubCon a couple years ago that they treat subdomains as sub-directpries for rankings, but since there is additional benefit from having them as sub-directories … I still strongly recommend that you use sub-directories over subdomains.

http://www.vbseo.com/f104/matt-cutts-subdomains-subdirectories-19100/
http://www.ditii.com/2007/12/07/google-matt-cutts-sub-domains-to-be-treated-as-folders/
“A post by Tedster at WebmasterWorld, where Tedster said: News flash from Las Vegas PubCon. Matt Cutts informed us that Google will very soon begin treating subdomains and subdirectories the same in this fashion: there will be only 2 total urls from a domain in any set of search results, so no more getting 3, 4 or however many spots via subdomains. We didn’t get any more information than just that basic heads-up.”

One related question is that if you want to translate your site into foreign tongues, some websites use subdomains, others use directories. With this specific case in mind, can someone tell me which is better for SERPs in the foreign tongue search engines (ie google.de, etc).

Thanks

Same as The OPC was saying, sub domains are use to separate specific information on your site so if you decide to use different languages the best way to go is by sub domains, english.domainname.com.

I wonder if you have to use the sub domain name in the foreign tongue francais.domainname.com / espanol.domainname.com or it doesn’t make a difference?

This is actually a great topic for another thread. There were really two questions being asked here …

1 – how to rank for language specific sites
2 – how to rank for language specific sites within a country

These are two entirely different strategies that I have used with international based clients that have major presence off and online very successfully.

I plan on starting a thread that covers these strategies next week (I am traveling currently)

scott polk