What should I consider before setting up a sub domain?

[Muhammad-Isap]

Morning all!

We've just been approached by IT. They've been asked to develop an online 'portal' where clients can upload and download materials.

IT will be developing a portal that sits on the company network perimeter (hosted on our internal servers). The concept is that 3^rd parties can get and update information in regards to progressing cases, the first use will be for agencies who will retrieve records via the portal and then post reports after a consultation.

however I would like to have an automatic link to forward to the portal from the web address: oursite.com/dave

We will look to create robot.txt and anything else to prevent from listings/indexes.

Does any of the above mess with your SEO?

The Directors have asked if they can have this on a sub-domain of our site.

Is this wise? And, are there any major SEO considerations for my team to worry about?

Better still, have any of you had to deal with this before? If so, what happened?

All the best,

John

[N1ghteyes]

So far as i can see, you should have no problem with this.

It looks like they want to hide the subdomain from indexes so as long as robots.txt. is properly configured, you should have no issue at all.

[renehansen]

Subdomains are seperate from your root domain SEO. I guess that you do not want search engines to discover the new site?

Deploy a noindex tag on the site to make sure that it is not indexed in the search engines. However, if you place it in a subfolder on your site (e.g. domain.com/site/) I will affect the overall impression of the site from a search engines perspective.

You could take a look at the Moz guide about domains (it could help you understand the difference in subdomains and root domains in respect to SEO): http://moz.com/learn/seo/domain