ramwaimea
02-07-2007, 08:19 AM
I have lot of subdomains in my site. I created subdomain for each city, so when the site expands to new cities, number of subdomains also goes up. I opted for subdomain instead of folder, mainly for branding.
I thought that the user will be happy to see seattle.domain.com instead of www.domain.com/seattle. So far, subdomains worked ok. I am thinking of whether to switch to simple folder structure due to following reasons.
1. My main domain has page rank of 4. Subdomains have page rank of 0. Just zero! All the links come to main domain. Subdomains have no backlinks. I think this also affect the ranking.
2. My domain comes up in the natural search results, but subdomains never show up there.
Even with folders, I can still keep subdomain structure using htaccess redirects. But, I am worried that if I have too many instructions in htaccess file that may slow down the system. I already have 20 subdomains, I expect to have atleast 10 more by the end of this year.
My questions:
1. Does it make any difference to the search engines whether I have folders and subdomains? IMO search engines need to go thru all the headache to find the relevant content for the keyword, but coders are breaking their head to adapt to search engines. ;-)
2. If I am going to go with folders, I will still use subdomains for branding, but that can be done by htaccess. I can have links point to subdomain.domain.com, but htaccess will redirect them to www.domain.com/subdomain. Is it ok to have 30 subdomain redirects in htaccess of main domain. Does the number of instructions (in htaccess) even matter?
Thanks!
I thought that the user will be happy to see seattle.domain.com instead of www.domain.com/seattle. So far, subdomains worked ok. I am thinking of whether to switch to simple folder structure due to following reasons.
1. My main domain has page rank of 4. Subdomains have page rank of 0. Just zero! All the links come to main domain. Subdomains have no backlinks. I think this also affect the ranking.
2. My domain comes up in the natural search results, but subdomains never show up there.
Even with folders, I can still keep subdomain structure using htaccess redirects. But, I am worried that if I have too many instructions in htaccess file that may slow down the system. I already have 20 subdomains, I expect to have atleast 10 more by the end of this year.
My questions:
1. Does it make any difference to the search engines whether I have folders and subdomains? IMO search engines need to go thru all the headache to find the relevant content for the keyword, but coders are breaking their head to adapt to search engines. ;-)
2. If I am going to go with folders, I will still use subdomains for branding, but that can be done by htaccess. I can have links point to subdomain.domain.com, but htaccess will redirect them to www.domain.com/subdomain. Is it ok to have 30 subdomain redirects in htaccess of main domain. Does the number of instructions (in htaccess) even matter?
Thanks!