12 replies to this topic

[roxpautienus]

I am working with a healthcare site that is essentially a portal for a hospitals many, many different centers, expertise, etc. We call the smaller sites within our main url "microsites." We would like the microsites to remain within the main url somehow because from a marketing perspective we have already gained market recognition on the main url. How should I set up my microsites, as subdomains or subdirectories? And, to confirm a subdomain is www.microsite.maindomain.com and a subdirectory would be www.maindomain.com/microsite?
Thanks for the help!

[samt]

I'd go with the www.maindomain.com/microsite setup. It just seems like it's easier to remember, maybe cause every site has www.domain.com/something, and they don't all have www.something.domain.com

[roxpautienus]

Thanks! And you think that will work submitting them as www.maindomain.com/microsite seperately with Search Engines? or will search engines think I am spamming them with additional pages?

[powerofeyes]

Hello Rox,
I would say subfolders and directors are a bad game in search engines. After this recent update value for a sub domain or sub folder weight has become very less. So please check the SERPs if you see lots of sub domains use it but I can see less and less sub domains are coming up in SERPs,
so it would be fine if you check the search engines before going ahead with optimization of sub folders or what so ever,
thanks,
VIJAY.

[Jill]

Welcome, roxpautienus!

You can do them either way, and you don't have to worry about submitting them to search engines. They will crawl the links that point to them and find them all by their little spidey selves!



Jill

[SearchRank]

One thing to consider is that if you do sub domains, search engines will see each one as a separate domain or web site whereas if you do sub folder, search engines will see them as the same domain or site.

IMO it is not a real issue in regards to SEO efforts which way you do it. You should ask yourself then, "what is best for those who will user our site - our visitors/customers?"

[TakeTheCann0lis]

One thing to consider is that if you do sub domains, search engines will see each one as a separate domain or web site whereas if you do sub folder, search engines will see them as the same domain or site.

Is this true?

Sub domains are considered separate? If you do a google search for site:tld.com you still get subdomain results in the search.

[Jill]

Wow, you dug up a thread from 2003 for this!

That was true in the past, but recently, Google has stated that they will be treating subdomains more like sub-directories. I'm not sure if they've started this yet or not. And it won't be for every site, such as Wikipedia, of course.

[Randy]

hmm... Back when this thread was started I was just a babe in the woods, with probably only 10 posts total. Help! I'm having flashbacks!

In addition to what Jill said above about Google's new way of viewing subdomains, I've not heard anything about Yahoo, MSN or anybody else changing the way they view subdomains.

[TakeTheCann0lis]

Wow, you dug up a thread from 2003 for this!

That was true in the past, but recently, Google has stated that they will be treating subdomains more like sub-directories. I'm not sure if they've started this yet or not. And it won't be for every site, such as Wikipedia, of course.

Sorry for digging up an old thread. I've been trying to find documentation on the web, and this thread was the most informative. I'm working for a ISP in NY that had over 44000 users, and we have about 11000 that still maintain a webpage on their 300kb's that we alloted for them back in the day. Their pages exist on a subdomain, and if you do a "site: domain.com" search on google, all 11k user pages show up. What I'm really wondering is, how will that effect my main site's SEO? Some of their pages have great content, but none of it is in the same genre as our corporate site.

Thanks again for the help!

Drew

[ojilcasi]

Wow, you dug up a thread from 2003 for this!

That was true in the past, but recently, Google has stated that they will be treating subdomains more like sub-directories. I'm not sure if they've started this yet or not. And it won't be for every site, such as Wikipedia, of course.

Hi Jill,
Can you please help me again with the same query?. What I want to know is whether it creates a difference if you name the URL as www.unitedtates.com/texas than wwww.texas.unitedstates.com . I am working on conceptulaising a tourism website and the name of the place is very competitve. So will it create any differenec if I create a subdomain instead of a directory or a folder for search engines

[Jill]

I would probably use subdomains for what you're talking about.

[bwelford]

Since the search engines will probably handle either with the same degree of relevancy, it comes down to what works for users. IMHO subdomains are very much better from a user perspective and possibly should be used more. It also involves less typing.