Thread

Which is “better” for SEO?

In my experience, there’s nothing to indicate that search engines care whether the URL string is a domain name/directory or a sub-domain.

Most search engines appear to prefer some measure of “density” in the URL string whereby the string matches, to one degree or another, keywords for the page, which, in turn match similar words in the body of the content. Even at that, there’s probably not much weight to such in search engine rankings any more, but every little bit helps.

Google, above other SE’s, seems to really pay attention to links in to a site, links out to other sites, especially those sites with similar content, providing far more search engine weight to content and relevant links than to keywords.

There’s probably a handful of items (content, links, keyword density) which may actually have bearing on search engine rankings, but so much of the so-called “optimization” I’ve seen seems to be a lot of baloney.

Both are equal url’s, thinking about it from a logical standpoint, and the user can probably enter the subdomain easier, hence blog.domain.com.
The whole slash/\backslash thing is just to complicated to try and enunciate.
Anybody who doesn’t know what a dot is, is well fit to be tied.

The search engines treat domains / sub-domains as separate sites.

In terms of SEO, unless your main site is already performing well in the SERPS for your target terms (and you’re looking to dominate the SERPS with various sub-domains), you’re probably better off keeping everything on the same domain.

This post over at SEOmoz contains a lot more useful information on the subject.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
Stephen

Thanks for the link Stephen, that sounds about right. There would be reason to go either way with it, depending on the SEO intention, like you mentioned using a sub-domain makes it a separate site really.
I’ve got hosting with unlimited sub-domains, it’s nice to have that architecture as an option.