Planning the New Blogs: Subdomains November 1, 2006
Posted by LearningNerd in Personal.trackback
Take a look at these sites:
From what I’ve read, subdomains look like the best way to go for my site. If each subdomain is really treated like a separate website, then I wouldn’t have to worry about confusing the search engines with too many topics. Sounds perfect! The blogs at About.com all have their own subdomains, and it obviously works for them. Every blog hosted at WordPress.com and Blogger.com also uses a subdomain, and the search engines do seem to treat each one as a separate website.
But then how do sites like Wikipedia rank so high on so many different keywords when every page is on the same site? Then again, Wikipedia gets tons of links — and look at that, I just added one more!
From what I understand, a lot of intrasite linking will increase a site’s rank. Wikipedia is all about intrasite linking. I have found that many of my pages have higher rankings than I would have expected, and that might be a result of all the links my posts have to other posts on my site.
This article has a ton of info about search engine optimization, and it has a WordPress focus to boot:
http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2006/01/15/dyi-search-engine-optimization/
Subdomains are a good idea, and I tried to set them up for my site at first, but I couldn’t figure out how to get WordPress to find my subdomain databases so I wimped out and went with a separate directory for each blog (i.e. “celebrityenglish.com/vocab” instead of “vocab.celebrityenglish.com”) My hosting company answered my email and told me how to fix the problem, but I didn’t want to wait to hear from them so I did it the way I knew how.
If you are making the decision based on page ranking, I don’t think it will make a difference which approach you take. Assuming that you will be linking to yourself, subdomains will mean that you will have lots of external links, and directories will mean that you will have lots of internal ones.
There’s a nice Related Articles WP plugin that makes it easy for you to set up links between your articles.
Thanks for the excellent info! After doing some more reading, I think subdomains will work best just for organization, even ignoring the search engines. I want to leave room for expansion.
I’m hoping to have a huge site one day!