Using Subdomains

Using subdomains is way of organizing your website under your parent domain. While a normal domain would be something like www.cnn.com, a subdomain would be written as http://sport.cnn.com. Notice that when using sub domains, the www in front of the URL is omitted, as they have a structure like http://domain.subdomain.com.

Some of the key reservations that businesses have to subdomains include having a prefix not related to your business name in the URL of your web pages, which leads to concerns that they might not be easily searchable by spiders and bots from search engines. However, most of these reasons are hollow and do not have much truth in them.

When it comes to search engine bots and spiders, the argument offered against subdomains is unfounded. Spiders and bots work on the concept of searchable key words and as long as these are present in your website and the site is optimized for SEO keywords, the nature of the domain name would not make a difference.

If your site has a number of subdomains in it, you have the option of submitting each subdomain under a different category, and get a good ranking for each of them in search results. The search engines view each subdomain as a new website. If this creates problems for you then it would be better to use subfolders under a domain instead of going for a subdomain.

Another cause of concern for people using sub domains is that if the parent domain is banned, the subdomain will also be banned. This is likely to happen in cases such as where the main domain contains adult material or violates the user agreement with the host in some other way.

There can be many arguments for and against the use of subdomains, but most of them are not significant enough to make much difference. The ultimate factor that should govern your decision will be whether using subdomains is more convenient for your site's users or not.