If you are asking about subdomains and if you should use them, you are probably asking in the context of whether or not subdomains will give your web site higher rankings. This is probably because your cheap web hosting company has given you unlimited subdomains and you want to figure out how many times your web site can show up in searches without being considered spam or getting penalized in the rankings for it. This is a legitimate question, because you should take advantage of every tool that is offered to you from a low cost web hosting company in order to get ahead in the rankings, but are subdomains worth it? Let’s first talk about what subdomains are and then figure out if your site can benefit from using subdomains to boost rankings.
Subdomains are simply secondary domains that are a part of a larger domain. For example, if you had the domain name ‘caseinpoint.com’, you subdomains could be ‘my.caseinpoint.com’ and ‘your.caseinpoint.com.’ If you wanted to create a sub –sub domain, you could name it something like ‘state.your.caseinpoint.com’. There isn’t a limit on how many subdomains you can add unless you can go over a length of 255 characters or your web hosting company limits them.
The original reason for subdomains really has to do with the organization and scalability of legitimately large websites, like the ones used by the government. Subdomains are helpful for finding information on monstrously large web sites because it is easier to type something like myinfo.econ.org to find your information in a website than it is to type in the name of a subdirectory.
A subdirectory is another way of organizing a web site, but instead of being separate like a subdomain, a subdirectory is just a file in the main domain name. The names of subdirectories in the case of government websites, however, can be extremely long, hard to enter accurately if you are in a hurry, and almost impossible to remember. So, most of the larger sites turn to subdomains out of necessity; not because they are using them specifically to get higher rankings. They also use subdomains for scalability. This is because subdomains can be used to store information for one domain on different computers. This strategy is helpful when a category on the site gets so large that it needs its own computer for storage.
Web developers for smaller sites came along and figured out that by using subdomains on smaller sites that they could trick the search engines into thinking that the sites were much larger than they actually were by creating many subdomains with duplicate or similar content and the same set of keywords. The original results in the best case scenario were that your site could achieve every one of the top ten search results and crowd everyone else out. Of course, Google and Yahoo put a stop to that and now websites that try this strategy are banned altogether or severely penalized in the rankings. If this is what you are trying to do and you find information that says this is a good strategy, check the year in which it was posted, because this information is old.
The use of subdomains to trick the search engines for rankings has faded into one of those Internet myths that newbies still hope is true and that Google conspiracy theorists still try to figure out. This is dangerous, because it gets people who are new to web hosting to think that subdomains will replace real in-bound links, article submissions, and other organic forms of Internet marketing to get rankings. Just remember that anytime someone tells you that there are shortcuts to getting long-term legitimate rankings by tricking the search engines, they either don’t know what they are talking about or they may have tried something that worked only one time. Do yourself a favor and get on the organic web hosting band wagon, because you can still use subdomains to improve your ranking if you have a real reason to do so.
There are some really good reasons to use subdomains, even if your website isn’t that big. The first one is the price. There are quite a few low cost web hosting companies that offer unlimited subdomains for free, so why not use them to your advantage? If you have a lot of content, or want to create more specific content, or just want to categorize your merchandise, you can create subdomains to make your web site more organized and at the same time give your web site a larger presence on the Internet. With a hosting package, subdomains only take a few minutes to set up and you still only have the maintenance of one account to worry about. You’ll also get higher rankings because you can put more of your keywords in the names of the subdomains and they will get ranked as well.
Subdomains are especially helpful if you have multiple businesses on one site, because you can separate them out and get ranked for all of them. For example, your main domain name may be about wedding services that you offer as a business; but you may also offer separate catering, a DJ service, and a banquet hall for other occasions. By using subdomains, you can give each business an entire site and get ranked for catering, live music, and hall rental separately. This will also give the wedding part of your domain name a more consistent overall theme of weddings, which is given separate consideration by the search engines as well.
If you only sell one product, you can still use subdomains to your advantage, but you will have to spend time to set everything up, because each subdomain has to be treated as a different site in order to be of any benefit to you as far as rankings go. So, with subdomains, you keep the original well-known domain name and designate each subdomain as a standalone resource. For example, if you sold sunglasses, you could take the original domain, “sunglassesexample.com” and create the subdomains, “cheap.sunglassesexample.com”, “children.sunglassesexample.com”, and “designer.sunglassesexample.com.”
In the sunglasses case, you will actually have the power of four web sites to promote your one ecommerce website. Now you’ve got some work to do though, because not only will each site have to have its own original content, each site will also have to be saved an updated separately. However, you will get huge promotional benefits because you will get much more content, alternative descriptions for product photos, and new title tags on page elements, as well as extra targeted keywords in your file and directory names. That’s a powerful way to use a free feature from your affordable web hosting company.
There is a catch though. All of your content has to be absolutely unique – and this is where the time and cost comes into play. If you don’t have unique content on each site and you link them together, your site will almost definitely get kicked out of the search engines. So don’t ever copy content from one site to another. You’ll have to either write copy yourself or hire someone to do it, or your site will become a spam site. For different content on the sunglasses site, under designer sunglasses you could have pages written about Louis Vuitton, Armani, and Fendi. Then on the children’s subdomain, you could have pages written about Snoopy, Hello Kitty, and Sponge Bob Square Pants. As you can see, if you continue on, you could break this down even further and create subdomains about each brand of sunglasses that you sell. Theoretically, you can create an incredible amount of unique content and become a highly ranked web site even though you only sell one product. Remember, since each subdomain functions as a separate site, you can also start submitting unique content to article directories and get inbound links from them. The key again is to submit unique content.
However, before you get excited, the work to maintain this many subdomains can be staggering. In fact, it is about the same amount of work you would need to do if you had this many different web sites. There aren’t any shortcuts either, but if you have a successful ecommerce site, it’s definitely worth having someone keep working on it. If you are just starting out, you might want to start with subdirectories instead of subdomains. They still organize information the same way, but require less work and you can always move the information to subdomains later.
Should you use subdomains? If your cheap web hosting company offers them, it’s worth thinking about. It’s also not anything you have to decide right away. The great thing about subdomains is that they are scalable, which means that you can add them as your site grows. And if you are growing you site organically, your skills and your knowledge of coding and shortcuts will grow as well, and also, if you need to buy some content every once in a while you can get it fairly cheap. The only thing to remember is not to let your subdomains get away from you and to keep your content unique and you will find that organically created subdomains are a great asset for any website.
