Subdomains and Google

[mreigle]

My website is www.mydomain.com and I sell bedding. I've created a subdomain at http://learn.mydomain.com as in informational resource for consumers to get information about bedding and the linens industry.

 

One of the main reasons I put the informational resource up is CONTENT. I want to have lots and lots of content. I was wondering if my having it on a different domain would impact their relation together in the eyes of a search engine.

[Guest]

Some of the info can be found here. If it is good or not is up to you, it can serve its purpose if their is a clear SEO benifit from doing it. "learn" might not be the correct name for the subdirectory, just type "learn" into Google and see if any of the sites on the first page are your competitors. Think more industry specific. Maybe something like "silk", "cotton", or "velvet" :thumbsup: might be better choices (I don't know much about bedding).

[mreigle]

This is pretty much the only instance I haven't used my URLs for SEO benefit simply because that particular wing of the site is for LEARNING.

 

I was asking if it would STILL help my main site just as much since it's on a different domain.

 

Let's say my learning site at http://learn.mydomain.com has a PageRank of 6. Would it still benefit my commercial site at http://www.mydomain.com? They're both linked together, so I'm assuming it would somewhat, but since it's no on the same domain, would it benefit it just as much?

[Guest]

Have you asked at seo chat or somewhere like that as to what would be the max benifit for you. IMO www.mydomain would be the max impact. What the difference would be between www.learn.mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com/learn would be, I do not know except they would be less than the main directory.

 

The only reason I would personally use a sub directory would be to squezze in a good keyword that I couldn't normally find a place for in my site. On my site I use subdirectories and one for content called "mr-coffee" for the content section called "ask mr coffee" as it is a good keyword and one I would not normally be able to use within the context of my site, and it fits the context of the section involved. "learn" is not much of a keyword advantage for you so I would be inclinded to keep it in your main directory.

 

Just my opinion though.

[Jack_mcs]

If it is just a subdomain, then you will get some benifit from the link. You would get more if it were created on a completely different server. Of course, that would increase your cost and may not be worth it to you. This is the idea behind using blogs for SEO. A link from an independant site is worth more than one that is linked to your site somehow (same server or link exchange). But keep in mind that all that will help you with is PR, which is a minor point in the land of SEO. If you concentrate more on optimizing your shop, you would end up with better results in the SE listings.

 

Jack