Hi,
So I know a little about SEO and have been doing research lately. Perhaps if I tell you my situation and what I am trying to do, it might help you give better answers.
Lets say I have a website that sells products. I have divided each different product type into their own subdomain. For example: tires.mydomain.com, appliances.mydomain.com etc.
The site is setup as an OSCommerce site with lots of modification to it. As a lot of the pages are the same(about us, how this works, etc etc) from sub-domain to sub-domain, each subdomain is set to point to the main directory. So there is only 1 page for about-us.php and tires.mydomain.com/about-us/ and appliances.mydomain.com/about-us/ just point to the same file. The different gallery pages are defined by a category ID and config file and that customizes the experience and products to what you need to see based on the subdomain.
Now, that being said, I am trying to create some landing pages that are very SEO complaint to rank high for certain key phrases. I had the option of adding them as a normal page or as a sub-domain. I thought that adding as a sub-domain might make it more clear.
As such lets say I choose a keyword phrase "Red"(as an example) for appliances.
I setup subdomain "red-appliances.mydomain.com" which is only meant to give information about our "red appliances" and then link over to our "appliances.mydomain.com" gallery page.
So with that base set, I have a few questions.
1. Do links that move from one of your sub-domains to the other hurt SEO?
- As an example, if all of the links on my red-appliances subdomain pointed to appliances.mydomain.com pages(like about-us, contact us etc) does that hurt SEO? This as a subdomain is really just meant to be a stand-alone content page geared towards a keyword.
2. Would this be better done as a sub-page instead of a sub-domain? I figured as a sub-domain homepage this would be easier to index and list as a separate site in webmaster tools, plus having your keyword phrase in the URL seemed like it would be good also.
3. Does it hurt SEO if your subdomain home page is the only page on that subdomain? I am only using the sub-domain for having a keyword in the URL and getting indexed faster.
I have already done some research, read articles and such on SEO and landing pages but any other advice you can give would be great. Thanks!