SEO Tycoon

**drkellogs** · 09-02-2008, 08:00 PM

Hi guys,

I have a dilemma, I am building a website that needs to be separated into two separate sites run by two separate CMS as well. (A modified wordpress theme optimized for SEO)

I am debating whether I should do subdomain1.domain.com & subdomain2.domain.com OR www.domain.com/foldername1 & www.domain.com/foldername2

My question for the more experienced SEO folks is this: which of the two would provide the most benefit for search engine rankings?

Thanks !

**juliensimon** · 09-02-2008, 08:05 PM

it won't change anything for the SERPS

**drkellogs** · 09-02-2008, 08:17 PM

I read that subdomains are considered to be individual sites with their own content/backlinks.

Wouldn't it be better to have folders then so that all backlinks and PR are combined for ONE domain as opposed to have them be split for two?

One thing that is unclear to me, is that if I run two separate sites that run on Wordpress in two different folders but on the SAME domain, that I will be somehow penalized for duplicate content from the big G.

I just want to make clear that both sites will have completely different content, but I heard that duplicate content also has to do with how the website design looks like than content.

Is there reason to worry for this?

Thanks!

**colbyt** · 09-02-2008, 08:33 PM

My understanding agrees with yours, but it may have changed.

**Learning Newbie** · 09-02-2008, 08:46 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by drkellogs

I have a dilemma, I am building a website that needs to be separated into two separate sites run by two separate CMS as well. (A modified wordpress theme optimized for SEO)

From a functional standpoint, you've just described subdomains. Especially if your definition of success includes a lot of visitors. It's possible to configure two different CMS or other off the shelf systems to work on a single domain against different folders (IIS does this by default), but only subdomains would allow them to be hosted on different machines, natively, for load balancing.

Duplicate content has to do with content being duplicated. This seemingly is punished across different sites, but more or less ignored within a site. For reasons that are pretty obvious if you think about them much. It has nothing to do with graphic design.

Subdomains used to be counted as wholly distinct sites. A few bad apples spoiled the whole batch. Bob.wordpress.com is different than alice.wordpress.com, but none of us are WordPress.