sub domain / search engine ?

[boat42]

Hello everybody,

 

I'm going to be using osCommerce for my ecommerce storefronts. I had a question about search engines and subdomains.

 

Here's the situation in hypothetical form.

 

Let's say that I want to offer the world camping equipment and I want to offer them Trendy clothes. Now I want to use one company's Domain name for all the stores but still have the stores as their own separate entitites. So let's say the company's name is XYZ company and the domain name is xyzcompany.com. For search engine optimization, would it be better to have camping.xyzcompany.com or xyzcompany.com/camping? Each of those would point to the camping store. And then there would be clothes.xyzcompany.com and xyzcompany.com/clothes which would point to a completely different store.

 

Or would having both of those be better? I would have camping.xyzcompany.com point to xyzcompany.com/camping (where the camping store would be located). And the clothes' store doing the same.

 

So really my question is do search engines recognize subdomains? I know the best thing would be to get a domain name for each store or is it?

 

 

Thank you in advance.

I'm sorry if I am not clear on what I am trying to ask or accomplish. Please ask questions if you would like me to elaborate more on what I have in mind.

 

-boat42