Hi,
I am building a micro site and need to assign the URL for it. This microsite will be one of several sharing a domain name. In terms of SEO or for other reasons, it is better to use a subdomain as in:
versus a slashed URL as in:
Assuming the names are descriptive, is one form better than the other. Also, do you know of any article references to back it up?
Please describe both SEO and other web issues you know of that would occur with either form of the URL.
Thanks!
Curious to see what the pros say about this one.
I’d imagine that the sitemap would read easier with website.com/folder/index.html rather than folder.website.com.
I would generally go for www.somesite.com/georgia - principally because it conforms to the patterns that people and machines expect.
A simple example - in your original message, the forum editor has recognised that the www. version is a URL and has automagically made it into a link, whereas it hasn’t realised that the georgia. version is a link - if you wanted to make it clickable in most editors, email clients, blogs, forum posts, social networking sites etc, you would need to include the http:// at the start, which is more effort than www., and looks less elegant.
Most people are habituated into typing www. in at the start of a URL (that is, out of those people who are capable of typing a URL into the address bar rather than into Google!), and so I guarantee that unless you are sitting over them poised to smack their hands when they reach towards the ‘W’ key, you will get a huge number of hits on www.georgia.somesite.com, which might or might not work, depending on your server configuration.
It is an advantage to allow people to type somesite.com without the www., which may or may not work properly when you set up alternative subdomains.