Sunday, September 28, 2008

The Pros and Cons of Using Subdomains

By Ricardo d Argence

Most businesses don't like to use subdomains because they feel like they give them a disadvantage in many areas, such as having a prefix name before your website, being ignored by bots and index spiders in search engines and all in all, it just doesn't look right. So let's check our facts on subdomains.

A subdomain is substitute or second level of a domain. A regular domain looks as follows: www.domain.com. A sub domain looks like this http://subdomain.domain.com. Subdomains do not have www on the front of them.

Subdomains rank efficiently well. Search engine spiders and bots are not prejudiced when it comes to the ranking of subdomains and regular domains. As long as your site has the right SEO keywords and has been optimized, whether you have a subdomain or regular domain name doesn't make a difference at all.

We will act like there are a lot of categories on your site. Should you make a submission to a search engine, you might submit every subdomain in its unique category yet obtain a nice ranking nonetheless.

Each subdomain would be looked at by search engines as a new site with its own index or home page. You may want to try creating subfolders on the subdomain to get around this so that search engines can read the folder as one set of site information.

If the main domain name is banned do not worry about your subdomain being banned. The subdomain is affected if the main domain happened to be banned. You will notice it a lot in sites which have adult content and are violating certain agreements signed with a provider that does not want a domain used to host adult material.

Again, there is nothing wrong with using a subdomain. If you want to develop each subdomain as its own entity, then by all means, do so. If not, get yourself a main domain name and use that as a certified landing page.

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