Subdomains – The Benefits And Drawbacks To Using Subdomains
Posted Under: Website Usability
There are benefits and drawbacks to using subdomains in your business website that you need to know.
Although many businesses feel that using subdomains disadvantages them in certain areas, facts are stubborn, and for the most part do not support this belief.
- Some business don’t like having a prefix name before the actual website.
- Others businesses feel that the search engine spiders will ignore a subdomain, so they refrain from using them.
- And many other business don’t use subdomains because they just don’t like the way they look in the URL bar.
So lets do a little fact checking on the benefits and drawbacks to using subdomains.
First of all, a subdomain is nothing more than the second level of an existing domain, and looks like this:
http://subdomain.maindomain.com
All subdomains can be identified by this format, plus they never have the www in the URL.
As long as your website is optimized with the proper SEO keywords, the search engines will crawl your site.
It is irrelevant whether or not you use a regular domain name or a subdomain; the search engine bots don’t seem to care one way or another when it comes to ranking.
Both seem to do equally well with the search engines.
If you have a lot of categories in your website, you could submit each category as a subdomain to the search engines, and get a good ranking for each.
The search engines will consider each subdomain as a new website with it’s own index or home page.
If you like, you can create subfolders on your subdomain to get around this. The search engines will read the subfolder as a separate set of site information.
What are the benefits and drawbacks to using subdomains in your business website, if your main domain gets banned for some particular reason?
This is a question that webmasters of adult websites often ask.
Occasionally an adult website will violate the terms and conditions that they agreed on with their provider that may not want adult material on their servers, banns their domain name.
Unfortunately, when the main domain name is banned, it will have some effect on the subdomain.
If you care to develop every subdomain as a separate entity, you may get around this problem if it should occur. Otherwise, just stick with a main domain name and use it as your landing page.
There are other benefits and drawbacks to using subdomains in your business, but for the most part, there is absolutely nothing wrong with using them.
