Fourth and Third Level Subdomain Interlinking

[rlevers]

Hi everyone.  I have a hopefully interesting client question I wanted to pose.  I do work for a company with three distinct locations that have unique offerings, service areas, etc.

I wouldn't want to see the three locations as subfolders (example company.com/locationone/, company.com/locationtwo/) of one site.  They are large and unique presences.  Fortunately, they did not organize their locations in such a way, and currently have their locations organized as subdomains, as in locationone.company.com, locationtwo.company.com.  I might have preferred locationone.com, locationtwo.com, etc., but that is what I am working with.

Their developer has been building new content on fourth level domains, as in newcontent.locationone.company.com and newcontent2.locationone.company.com.  In one case one of these fourth level domains also contains a different but parallel checkout process to the one already present on third level domain locationone.company.com.

I am looking for advice on how to interlink these sites, and whether to discourage them from building out new fourth level domains (newcontent3.locationone.company.com, etc.) or even to get rid of the current fourth level domains altogether.  I'm not sure if the fact that they're subdomains and not subfolders matters as much as it used to.

Is this a case of subdomain phobia, or are my concerns justified?  Any special advice on dealing with interlinking across fourth, third, and second level domains?

Thanks!

[SanketPatel]

Hi Robyn,

Tom Schmitz has written awesome post on inter linking and website structure. Here is the link:

http://searchengineland.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-seo-web-structure-internal-links-110994

Hope this will help you out....