4 replies to this topic

[scamsel]

hi, i had a question regarding subdomains. with most hosting companies it seems you are assigned a primary domain and for any additional domains you add on a subdomain is automatically created for you

for example, say your primary domain is www.computers.com and then you want to add another domain, say www.music.com.

a subdomain is then created called www.music.computers.com (which brings you to the www.music.com site).

my question is how does this affect google in crawling these different sites? so it will crawl computers.com and music.com and index those based on the content on those individual sites, but then when it gets to www.music.computers.com, it will find the content on www.music.com, but since it is crawling the subdomain url will that affect your original www.computers.com info?

very confusing to me how this would be handled. basically do you have to have an seperate hosting account for each website you have that is about different content?

thanks for any help, hope i made sense in my question

[Jill]

As long as your server is configured properly the search engines will only know it's a domain not a subdomain.

[scamsel]

As long as your server is configured properly the search engines will only know it's a domain not a subdomain.

thanks jill. so just to clarify. the fact that the music.computers is a subdomain of computers.com, doesn't really matter, a search engine will typically treat the music.computers.com as a seperate and independent website?

and what are you referring to exactly about the server configuration?

[Randy]

You'll want either one or the other address to be the one that shows up for the search engines scamsel. Not both.

A properly configured server would automatically 301 redirect requests for the music.computers.com to the www.music.com address. I believe that's what Jill is saying.

[WSO]

with most hosting companies it seems you are assigned a primary domain and for any additional domains you add on a subdomain is automatically created for you

Scamsel, I'm not sure I'd agree that "most" hosting companies behave that way. I suppose that for some, that might be the only way to set up a new domain without any additional cost, but all of the hosting companies we work with allow us to add multiple domains to one account. Some charge a nominal fee for that, others do not.

If the only way to create a second web site on your account is to have a subdomain created, I'd look into some other hosts. If I was the owner of the music.com site, I would not want the url to be music.computers.com.

Tom