Google and subdomains ?

SteveW · Post by **SteveW** » Wed Feb 21, 2007 10:00 am

I run http://www.keyworks-locksmiths.co.uk. In general when people search for a locksmiths in London they do so by area such as locksmiths in Chelsea or Locksmiths in Wimbledon etc. As such we have to be able to cover all of these searches with our website.

If you take a look at our site you can see that we have tried to provide separate pages for each area. This has had some success but not as much as we would have liked. We have been considering turning these pages into separate sub-domains. How would Google react to this ?... is it likely to work ?.... will Google just think of this as Spam ?....

What would we have to do to make this idea work ?

Sorry lots of questions

Best Regards
SteveW

SteveW · Post by **SteveW** » Wed Feb 21, 2007 10:56 am

JUst to add... any ideas on other ways we could get our site to do what it needs to do would be much appreciated. This is the first site i have ever done myself so any sugestions would be welcome.

peterko · Post by **peterko** » Wed Feb 21, 2007 6:06 pm

Hi SteveW,

First of all if you want to get better results from the Google and other SE search, you should think about your website optimization. Currently it's not optimized and looks not friendly to the search engines.

Check it by yourself, use some tools, go for example to http://www.submitexpress.com/analyzer/ and you will see what is going on with your site: "Title" has too many characters, "keywords" are stuffed, poor "description" and "keywords" relevancy to the content of your site. I also noticed in your source code a big mess with the upper portion of your code. For example, if you open <head>... you should make it somewhere close ...</head>. I didn't find where you put </head>. Then, normaly it should be some structure in the upper portion of the code with certain sequence of tags. I mead usually it should be something like that:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">

<html>
<head>
<title>.......</title>
<meta name="description" content=".......">
<meta name="keywords" content=".......">
<meta name="robots" CONTENT="all, index, follow">

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

............... and so on
</head>

What I mentioned above is very important to be considered as friendly environment for the search engines. If SE find your website not friendly, then it decrease the site ranking, and it means you will get worse search results than you could.

Talking about sub-domains, honestly I didn't get it. Do you mean alias for your major domain name, like for example: "www.your_subname.your_domain_name.com"? Or you mean create separate domain names for your multiple pages? I'm not sure that makes a sence. Anyway, if you assign some new name to your webpage it will take a time until the page get indexed and recieve PR. If your page with the new name doesn't have appropriate ranking, that means you will not get expected search results soon.

That's what I think, hope it will help.

Have a great day,
Peter

AfricanMango1 · Post by **AfricanMango1** » Thu Feb 22, 2007 4:15 am

Yes, I agree, you need to make your site SEO friendly. About your question, subfolders is better than subdomain in your case. Subdomains should be used if you have content for different countries, otherwise subfolders is more efficient in order to transfer the popularity across different sections. Saying that, the use of subdomains is not spam.

peterko · Post by **peterko** » Wed Sep 05, 2007 3:57 pm

Seo Madrid wrote:Yes, I agree, you need to make your site SEO friendly. About your question, subfolders is better than subdomain in your case. Subdomains should be used if you have content for different countries, otherwise subfolders is more efficient in order to transfer the popularity across different sections. Saying that, the use of subdomains is not spam.

Based on my experience, it's always hard to raise PR of subdomains. It looks like we start it from scretch, and it probably requires some backlinks to raise PR. Not like regular pages within subfolders, which we don't have to promote separatelly. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Have a great day,
Peter

Wishbone · Post by **Wishbone** » Wed Sep 05, 2007 10:24 pm

You better practice naming subpages as in their keywords. Here's an example:

Chelsea

http:// keyworks-locksmiths .co.uk/ 36.html

it is better if you name the Chelsea link to:

http://keyworks-locksmiths .co.uk/ Chelsea.html

JJustine · Post by **JJustine** » Thu Sep 06, 2007 4:20 am

The main thing is location, that you want to target is 'keyword'. If you can manage to get it in the link then it doesn't matter if it is a subdomain or subpage or subdirectory. ATB

peterko · Post by **peterko** » Thu Sep 06, 2007 8:06 am

JJustine wrote:The main thing is location, that you want to target is 'keyword'. If you can manage to get it in the link then it doesn't matter if it is a subdomain or subpage or subdirectory. ATB

You are right at some point, but it really matters where you locate your keyword in the link. The closer keyword to the root is the better. The other thing you should also keep in mind, try to avoid using keyword phrase as one big word when you name your file or directory. Try to avoid underscores, better use hyphens. So it's not that simple when you apply your keywords within your link.

Have a great day,
Peter

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