Subdomains – Whaddaya Reckon?

Now, I’m no SEO expert but I am starting to grasp some of the basics.

One of the questions that has always bugged me is the value of subdomains in terms of SEO. There are as many differing opinions about subdomains as there are people on the net, almost!

I like subdomains, that doesn’t mean to validate their usefulness but here’s a couple of reasons I like them.

• Having some Scottish blood in me I’m careful with my money, most of the time! If you’re wanting to put up lots of mini sites then a generic domain like freeinfo-site.com lends itself to subdomains like identitytheft-freeinfo-site.com and you aren’t shelling out for a new domain name every time you want to put up a new site. Once you’re making squillions of dollars it probably isn’t a problem but when you’re starting out it can be a killer of an expense.
• Financials aside one key SEO strategy is to have your keywords in the URL of your site. What better way than to use a subdomain? Try and get a TLD of makemoney.com whereas makemoney.freeinfo-site.com you can have for nothing. BUT does that mean it’s useful?

There are so many other factors involved in getting ranked in the search engines that it’s difficult without extensive testing, over a long period of time, to isolate one individual aspect’s effect.

I asked Jon Leger this question and he has had subdomains that have ranked highly. He also pointed me to a post, Google to Begin Treating Subdomains as Folders: Max 2 Results Per Search, which he believes has made people think subdomains aren’t as valuable. Where, in reality, if you read that post, it is just Googles continued mission to provide the best variety of results to searches.

By implication a single domain name wasn’t getting ranked multiple times, for that reason, so webmasters tried to circumvent the algorithm by using subdomains to get their TLD listed more often. The change there just brought subdomains back in line with domains.

My personal opinion, I can’t see any logical reason why subdomains shouldn’t be as effective and I certainly have two positives for using them.

I really am interested in other people’s opinion on this so please leave a comment. At the very least you’ll get a link to your site. Always good for SEO and feel free to link to here.