You're wrong....

haha just kidding. Seriously, I don't want to be in a forum where everyone says "that's right Bob..."

Unless, someone chips in with "I've found the opposite to be true for my situation..." or "but what about this?.." we don't learn anything new, or take time to stop and rethink our original concepts.

The idea of using a sub-domain to avoid the sandbox is an interesting one, but my sub-domain experiment is for a medium competitive term and maybe sandbox effects don't apply. How about yours?

Another advantage of a subdomain is that it can help people on a budget who can't get free deeplinks. There's lots to think about!

Cheers,
Paz.

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10.3 million entries for Hotels in Turkey but I'm still chipping away.

Ok... you are a funny guy... haha

Re: sandbox avoided on subdomains, my test was with a moderately competitive term, not "online gaming" or "adult dvds". But, the main site was optimized for comparably competitive terms in the same field and they were all sandboxed from site launch (May 04) until Feb 05. I launched the subdomain in March 05 and the target keyword was on page 1 as soon as the page was crawled and was #1 within a couple weeks. I have no reason to believe that the term wouldn't have been sandboxed on a new site. I guess i could test it by buying a new domain, targeting the same term and pointing all the same links at it, but this is a commerce site that is doing well and building a name for itself, so I don't really want to play around too much and risk getting spanked.

Cheers,
bruce

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Interesting thread.

I have a site that uses subdomains. It used to do well in MSN, but has now vanished. It used to do really well in Yahoo, and is slowly sinking. Never has shown up in Google. The PR dropped from 3 to 1 on all pages on all subdomains. I have almost no backlinks to the subdomains and have minimized crosslinking.

I am considering switching to folders. I can 301 redirect with htaccess from the subs to folders. I see an advantage in that I can crosslink with internal links without thinking about a penaltly and I can focus link building to the index. The site will have more size in hopes that the "Amazon Effect" still impacts the SERPS. An added bonus is that the subdomain pages will be added to the ad coop and I would get more weight and more links.

Is this wise? The domain is about 10 months old and sandboxed and gets very little traffic.

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Hi,

I would say to anyone who was considering such a major site change (a major change from an SE perspective), don't do it unless you can stand an extended drop in serps, but that's not a problem in your case. I 100% agree with the way you've described how you would implement it.

My only concern is that after 10 months, you are close to breaking out of the sandbox, if you haven't done so already. Also, you probably should have done a link campaign on the sub-domains, it can't be enough to create a sub-domain and expect to shoot up the serps...

The drop in yahoo and msn could be due to a "reverse-amazon" effect, but again a backlink campaign would help. How many sub-domains are we talking about here, and how many pages on each (roughly)?

So maybe your experiment's not had a chance to work for you - but of course this is a problem with sub-domains, you effectively have to manage more sites.

I guess you will have to have a serious think about if you have the time to carry on, or just abandon the whole idea go back to a standard sub-directory structure.

Those are my thoughts anyway!

Cheers,
Paz.

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10.3 million entries for Hotels in Turkey but I'm still chipping away.

i got site with 60 subdomains

i give subdomain to every company who submit link in my local directory, all subdomain have navigation like main domain, i don't link subdomains and i did not see nothing wrong with that yet, site is 6 months old

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Web design & izrada web stranica

You could always set up 301 redirects from the subs to the new location and suffer no loss at all

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Wildfire Marketing Forum - Visit our free marketing forum to learn and share tips about marketing.

Nice thread people.

My experience and 2 cents:

I've used to have several sites using subs, 2-3 years ago, They worked very good at that time, then they started giving me some problems with SERPs, so I stopped using subs and started doing dirs, as far as I know, Dirs are much better than subs. Those sites reflected my decision in a very positive way.

If you're starting a site from scratch I recommend you to use dirs instead of complicating your existence trying to do something you will need to change later on.

Of course, just my .02.

Obi-NAN-Cannabis

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Marketing Solutions

thanks for some great information everyone!

I'm going with folders.

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