I have a hosting account, which limits only 8 domain sites to be hosted. but unlimited sub-domains can be hosted.
I was wondering, if i can host a new site, but direct/forward this site to one of the sub-domain of another website.

are there any disadvantages here?
what would be the issues that one can face at later point of time?
how would search engines work here?


thanks for your input...

You have to be slightly careful with the term "sub-domain" as some cPanel providers/customers seem to think this is different to the rest of the world; I've seen it used interchangably with a cPanel add-on domain.

So on the assumption that you understand "sub-domain" to mean the same as me, which is something in the form of subdomain.domain.com...

There's nothing stopping you from having completely different and unrelated content on subdomain.domain.com compared to domain.com.

The obvious (potential) disadvantage is that visitors may not remember the correct format and may attempt to visit your site without inserting . between subdomain and domain: for example, if you have bc.com and create subdomain a.bc.com they may instead visit abc.com which would obviously get them something a little different

Another potential disadvantage is lack of (or complicated) email and other peripherals associated with your subdomain; the control panel may not enable you to create mailboxes for a.bc.com (e.g. you@a.bc.com) which may pose a problem for you.

I don't know of any specific dislike of subdomains from a search engine's point of view - www.domain.com is a subdomain anyway, although this may be treated as a special case. I'd suggest that you should ask this part of your query over in one of the Search Engine Talk forums

damien - Thanks. Useful post

Well on my server a sub domain can be pointed to a subdirectory within the server or to any host on any server. If the data for the sub domain is held on the same server then most webspiders will also index and find any sub domains that are within the same host.
My New Zealand based search engines webspider would also index any subdomains found at the same time as it indexes the main domain.
I hope this helps.

SEO definitely works at the page level with each page being ranked independently. so for search engines there'll be no difference at all. It's all about user-friendliness here, but damien has already written about it.

redirecting is not recommended for seo.

you have to seo the subdomain as well. And note that many directory will reject subdomain submission.

Originally Posted by charlesgan

redirecting is not recommended for seo.

you have to seo the subdomain as well. And note that many directory will reject subdomain submission.

What do you mean?

My understanding is that a 301 redirect ('moved permanently') will pass any "PR" from the redirected page to the new one; i.e. it literally tells the search engine spider that the content that used to be located at one URI has moved to a new URI... that's the entire purpose of this HTTP response code.

This is supported by this page.

If you use some other method to redirect, and/or don't provide the appropriate response codes etc. then your seo may be affected. This is all really for another thread (and I certainly don't claim to know a great deal about it!), but I also think that seo is predominantly a page issue rather than per site?

Damien you're right about the 301s. Redirecting via a 301 is often recommended as good seo. I have no idea where charlesgan's comment came from.

While it's true pages are what gets ranked seo is affected at a site level. Particularly at Google, the authority a site has plays a very big part in how its pages rank. When one of your pages gathers an incoming links it helps to raise the overall authority of your site. That in turn can help your other pages to rank better.

Yes, it's absolutely true that search engines rank pages and not sites, but there is something going on at the site level as well.

I think redirection helps much in SEO ranking.

Originally Posted by vangogh

Yes, it's absolutely true that search engines rank pages and not sites, but there is something going on at the site level as well.

Ok. So how do subdomains affect that? I.e. are they considered to be part of the same site as the main domain (e.g. sub.domain.com part of domain.com site?).

Presumably at least everything within the same subdomain is considered part of a "site"? Therefore with regards to the OP this wouldn't pose any significant SEO problem since the intention is/was to use a subdomain for a distinct site in it's own right.

A subdomain is seen as a completely different domain as far as a search engine is concerned. So if a part of your site is on a subdomain you're in essence trying to rank two different domains.

There can be advantages to that like being able to control more of the first page of results if you can get both the domain and subdomain ranking there. Also links between the main domain and the subdomain will be seen as external links instead of internal links.

For most sites you're probably better off going with subfolders, but there are certainly no absolutes here.