Quite often I’ve seen questions on SEO forums asking which is better from an SEO perspective – using a subdomain or using a directory for a specific category of content. Up until now I’d have always said a directory is easier to rank and from my experience, it seems Google wants a subdomain to bed in before it shows it any love. Possibly a trust factor, although it struck me as odd if a domain was already ranking.
Anyway, I’ve revised my opinion a little recently. I still reckon a directory is better for most content, however when it comes to geo-targetted content, I’m inclining towards the subdomain now. For example if I wanted a category of information targetted specifically at the UK from my US website, setting up uk.domain.com could well have one major advantage. And that is?
Well, I only recently discovered that you can redirect subdomains to be hosted elsewhere, on a different server. So you might host your main domain in the US, set up your UK subdomain and point it at another website or directory on another website hosted in a different location. You have to be a little careful not to run into the old “duplicate content” problem, in that if your other site which contains the content you are pointing at is already indexed, Google will see duplicate sites. From what I can see, Google won’t apply a penalty to either site, but it is likely to stop ranking one of them, or rank it a lot lower. Possibly even both…it’s difficult to say.
But this method makes a lot of sense when you consider that Google geo-targets search results and takes into consideration a number of relevant factors, including where your site is hosted, the terminolgy/language used and any target market you may determine. If you have a Google Webmastertools account, you may be able to differentiate your subdomain in there by setting the target audience, although I haven’t tested this yet.