Subdomains vs. Subdirectories

[007]

I'm interested in hearing what everyone thinks about these when it comes to SEO. Is it better to use subdomains or subdirectories? Obviously there are different situations that will be better for each, but it would be nice to compare the pros and cons of both.

What do you prefer and in what situations?

~007

[AHKIPSLIPKNOT666]

what 've i heard and read is that subdomain will get index faster than subdirectories.

[Yellowmc]

I will go with sub directories because search engine consider sub domains diferent than the domains , so sub directories will go faster indexed

[change]

indexing is not a problem , the thing which matters is that subdomain is considered to be seperate domain by major search engines

[droplister]

I think SEs like subdirectories better, I think google said they like to see how your site is organized, and better organization gets better ranking, so domain.com/category/subcategory/topic.html or something like that is better in their eyes than category.domain/subcategory/topic.html Also I think subdomainsn should be used when the service found at the subdomain is totally different from the main service at the domain.com.



I dont proof read so beware

[bluearrow]

I think sub-domains are good if u create separate section for that keyword or topic. like sports.com and soccer.sports.com. it would be good since u have derect keyword in yr name. but this might be slow to get index and search engins would take it as a differnt site.But if your main site have Good PR and Subdomain has links from main site [if subjects and keywords are related] u will get a better rank. also this might give a boost to main sites PR after the subdomain get indexed.

[etech-peter]

Sub-domains have been used to manipulate some Search Engine results so the Search Engines, in this case Google, do look a little more closely at sub-domain’s than they do sub-directory pages. However having said that I think there's a little difference in the way sub-domains and sub-directory pages are ranked by the SE’s. The one thing you do need to be aware of is that heavy cross linking of sub-domains can get you into trouble with google.

[cursal]

Sub-domains have been used to manipulate some Search Engine results so the Search Engines, in this case Google, do look a little more closely at sub-domain’s than they do sub-directory pages. However having said that I think there's a little difference in the way sub-domains and sub-directory pages are ranked by the SE’s. The one thing you do need to be aware of is that heavy cross linking of sub-domains can get you into trouble with google.

Can you explain your reasoning or give proof of this?

Do you mean from sub-domain to domain
or
sub-domain to sub-domain

Both?

[etech-peter]

Can you explain your reasoning or give proof of this?

Do you mean from sub-domain to domain
or
sub-domain to sub-domain

Both?

I meant sub-domain to sub-domain. Excessive cross linking may be penalized by the search engines in the form of site drop down in search results and the site may even disappear from search engine results.