Sub Domain SEO

[Khuram]

I am thinking to Add Sub Domains to get better rankings for Local Searches. So I will develop City Specific Sites with Specific Language. For Example qatar.wisnetsol.com. IT will be in Arabic. If my Good standing and Ranking on Google for wisnetsol.com will help my subdomain to rank better?

if we setup wisnetsol.com/qatar, how it can target Qatar in Google Webmaster tools?

Will links for qatar.wisnetsol.com and wisnetsol.com are seprate?

What do you think about this strategy? Is it good or bad?

[saibose]

Hi Kashifa,

I would say, subdomains is a bad idea to start. If you havent started, I would suggest you to go in for a folder based URL. Sub folder URLs that is wisnetsol.com/qatar or something like taht would give you better mileage. Subdomains are often taken as separate domains by Google, so you would have to do all the hard work for the subdomain as well.

[Khuram]

Thanks saibose. I have not started yet. I just thought about it, as google doesn't allow you to set seprate folders to target different areas.

What you say about that?

[saibose]

Check out microsoft.com. They have a global website at microsoft.com which by default redirects to Microsoft US. If you go and select another country, you can see the change in URL.

You can see Matt Cutt's Opinion here:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/

Unless you are confident about your offerings and if the intended content of your sub domains would be very different from your website's homepage offering, then maybe you can go in for a sub domain kind of architecture.(citing Matt's closing words)

[ninjamarketer]

The best way to target local market is to have subfolders for local areas. I would not say that having a locally targeted subdomain is bad it is just that sub domain will not benefit the authority of the main domain too much. Building content on the sub folder will not only help you rank for local keywords but it will relatively easier to rank since one of the top 5 ranking factors is the authority of the domain.

If you are trying to target a country then it is best to have a country specific TLD. i.e www.google.in (india), googe.com.mx (for mexico) and then target the city within the country using a sub folder. www.google.in/mumbai

Best

Sameer

[StalkerB]

Actually you can target countries using subfolders if you add yoursite/region/ to WMT

Site Config > Settings > Geographic Target

But it's not as seperated as using a subdomain.

I target countries using subfolders and it can work quite well.

[StalkerB]

Actually the last couple of YouMOZ posts have dealt with the subject. Might be worth readin and making a decision from there - http://www.seomoz.org/ugc