What can you say about sub domains regarding search engines

Friends of me ask me often what can be done to get them listed with a better ranking. The problem often is that they run their home page on a sub domain like home.mindspring.com or charter.net.

One of the recommends I do is to offer them a small sized server and advise them to get their own domain name because I have seen some search engines where you can not even submit sites hosted on sub domains so I did not ever try it.

Do you have more experiences in this issue and found some more reasons to give good advice?

It is highly likely that if your friends are using free hosting services, then they probably have done absolutely NO search engine optimization on their sites. So, I would say that you should look their sites over, and advise them to optimize their sites (or offer to do it for them).

You are right, they do not know anything about optimizing and I could do that for them however, I do not know of you have a change because I do not think that search robots are visiting those free domains, do they? May be with a few cross links from outside?

AFAIK Google hates those free homepages for exactly the reason you are describing.

Since Google doesn't know which subdomains belong to which site, it would probably go to home.mindspring.com and www.mindspring.com and that's IT, no further. Plus, Google has trouble figuring out the PageRank for sites like that and will usually default to a low numbered "guess".

Tell them to get better hosting. I have some good deals going right now.

The cost of a domain name is 6-8 United States dollars for a year. A small company website is often less then 5 mega bytes, so hosting should not run at more than a few dollars a month. If your friend runs a business, but are unwilling to spend that money. Then he/she problebly dosn't care much for his/her web presens.

I've seen some very high PR subdomain pages.....

Yeah. look at all the blogs on www.typepad.com Everyone's blog is at subdomain.typepad.com, but there are great PRs there. I've been told Google actually sees subdomains as seperate URLs. I wouldn't doubt the problem with the pages you see, is just that there is no SEO

Yeah, and they all interlink with one another...

That is correct. This all boils down to that most free hosts actually prevent Google and others from spidering the subdomains to save system resources. I have 25,000 pages and I get about 100,000 requests a day from spiders. Imagine what a free host would get. Bots slow servers down and eat up your bandwidth.

If you are lucky enough to get indexed without optimization than your low ranking is what your deserves as it's doubtful any of those sites have backlinks. Most people that dont know SEOs think the engines will bring them traffic without ever listing their site in a directory.

Very good points.

sub-domain or folder has nothing to do with PageRank. PR is about backlinks.

forums.seochat.com (right here) is PR8.
news.google.com is PR10.

aren't they all sub-domains?

I have two sites with a subdomain. And both are flash sites.

One is ranking #8 for its main keyword after 3 weeks and the other is #1 after 4 days.

I appreciate the #1 ranking might be artificially high, but the other site has proven to be rather steady.

I'm planning on getting domain names for both of the sites. Would this adversely affect the ranking of the sites?

you have to do a 301 redirect, otherwise all the BL and PR won't transfer.

Now am I right in thinking that a 301 redirect is CNAME pointing?

What is the difference between CNAME and A name pointing - or is it part of the same process?

Thanks.

I have several sites that are subdomains with no visible difference that I have detected so far. It is all down to SEO.

Sub domain - Bridal at Petticoatdreams


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