will spreading content over subdomain harm the websites's ranking (SEO)

[saul11]

I have a client whom I reshape the website for. It will become a community website while it is now more of an organization website (informative). For every member we'll be providing a subdomain (user.site.eg), and not very much content will be left on the actual domain (site.eg). I warned my client that having subdomain will make the site look very content-poor for searchengines (it will be seen as a lot of separate sites) and so it will become low-ranked, but my client believes that because the ranking currently is very good, that won't happen...


Is the subdomain thing really such a bad idea like I believe it is?

Or if we crosslink much (user to user, domain to user and user to domain), will that do the trick or any good?

[yamaharuss]

I don't think having many subdomains is a bad thing. The more links you have back to your primary site, the better. If they have a good ranking now I don't see any way the subdomains would hurt the ranking.

[saul11]

hi yamaharuss, thx for your reply,

the content on the main domain will change and it will become quite few, so I guess the searchengines will not have much to index and thus will rank the site lower...
I'm not sure links from subdomain count as much as 'real' links do?

[felgall]

Each page of a site is ranked completely separately. The links between the pages are one of the things that helps to improve the rankings of the individual pages. Having each page covering a more specific topic within the overall subject that the site covers should result in higher ranking for each page for the specific topics.

[SEO_guru]

Your client is mistaken. If a site is found at www.mysite.com and has good ranking with 50 pages of content, then it changes so www.mysite.com ends up with 5 pages of content, and subsite.mysite.com has 1 page and subsite2.mysite.com has 1 page and so forth, eventually the main site will definitely suffer to a certain degree.

Unless all those subsites themselves gain good ranking, the value of the links back to the main site from them will be very low.

As a result, you would need to do other things to counter the loss of depth and overall weight for the main site.

How many pages does the original site have? How long has that site been online? Every page from that main site by now would have contributed a certain amount of weight to the overall site's ranking. As those pages disappear, their bonus value to the total for the main site will be gone.

Sure, over time, the new subsites may ultimately become of enough value in linking back to the main site to counter some of the loss. But how long would that take? There's no way to know in advance. And again, I am fairly confident that even then it will still be less than sufficient to make up for the issues described above.

Gambling with search engine ranking this way without having a solid plan of action in place to counter the loss could cause serious ranking and positioning damage. It may not be seen right away though because of several factors, nevertheless, it will ultimately take it's toll.