Subdomains & SEO

[martyc]

Exact match domains are great for ranking but what about domains which contain just half of the full phrase being targeted?

eg. If you owned the domain rentals.co.uk but wanted to target the search term "car rentals"

Regarding backlinks, would it be best to link back to your rentals.co.uk homepage (using anchor text "car rentals") or to one of the following:

a) www.rentals.co.uk/car-rentals

b) car.rentals.co.uk AND 301 redirect to www.rentals.co.uk

c) car.rentals.co.uk AND 301 redirect to www.rentals.co.uk/car-rentals

[kchandler]

I would go after backlinks with the anchor text of "car rentals" back to www.rentals.co.uk/car-rentals. It will increase your domain authority and page authority without the risk of splitting your links across domains.

[SimonCullum]

Hi Marty

Rand did a Blog post on this back in October, check out http://www.seomoz.org/blog/exact-match-domains-are-far-too-powerful-is-their-time-limited

Historically, exact match domains appear to have proved great for rankings (high correlation, though not necessarily causation).  It seems to be the general expectation, which I agree with, that recently and moving forwards, exact match domains won't have such a high weighting by the search engine algorithms, Google in particular.

If you can get hold of an exact match domain, then great, though not necessary if the website does it's job well and has all the usuals, such as great content and high quality relevant inbound links.

An example to build confidence;  Google 'car rental insurance' you'll see that the 1st result is www.insurance4carhire.com which doesn't have the term 'rental' in the domain name.

Backlinks;  naturally looking is usually the best policy. Certainly some to the homepage, some deep links too, usually to the main product pages.  Depends on which pages you feel to be the most important to your visitors.

301'ing backlinks and subdomains; not advisable and usually some of that valuable link juice is lost. Best to have all or as many as possible pointing to the ultimate destination page.

Hope that helps,

Regards

Simon

[AlanMosley]

If you want to rank for car rentals, i would have a seperate page for it, i would not 301 back to homepage there would be on no use of having a different url in teh first place. it would be in fact leak a bit of link juice as 301's leak link juice.

If you havge a lot of content for car rentals i would go for the sub domain. I have always prefered sub domains to sub directories but 2 recent development have pushed me further that way.
1. google WMT now count links from sub directories to a root directories as internal links and assume ownership of sub domains simply if you own the root domain, unless the sub domain has been verified but somone else.

2. Site links for a root domain include pages from sub domains.

In my expirences link juice flows freely from root to sub domains and back if you have stronng internal linking structure from sub domains to root domains and back..

[martyc]

Many thanks for both responses.  My thoughts about 301'ing subdomains were the same until I recently came across a site listing their subdomain (301 to homepage) in backlinks which completed the search phrase by joining both subdomain and domain together.  They rank #1 for the search term in Google.  However, I have also seen them using the same anchor text linking to their homepage so this could be a legacy strategy.

Do you think submain + domain = search phrase carries any advantage?

[kchandler]

For every 301 redirect you do, you lose a little link juice.

Also, from my experiences with direct match domains... in google it barely helps. However yahoo and bing still place a lot of value in it. I would focus on building relevant links and on page optimizations for your site rather than trying to get keyword matches in your domain.

[martyc]

V.interesting, thanks.  My only hesistation about using subdomains would be splitting the authority between the two.

But wondering in my reply to Simon about whether there are any benefit of submain + domain = search phrase?

[martyc]

Thanks Kyle.  So direct match subdomains don't come close to exact match domains?

[AlanMosley]

I am not sure how sub + domain ranks in comparison to purly having the keywords in thedomain name itself, but it certainly would help.

I noted that my grammar and spelling was not that good in my explaining above, so
may recap. If you 301 the subdomain, then it will not appear in searh engines
at all, it will show the final url, and there would be no benefit.

As for splitting authority, I don’t think that is true. Looking a site links for
domainname.com shows links for sub.domainname.com, I thing this shows that
search engines can tell it is the same site.

[kchandler]

Sorry i may have worded that oddly in my reply. They would certainly count as a direct match if they are in subdomains. What i was trying to stress is that Google doesn't value direct match domains as much as they use too. However, Bing and Yahoo still do.

So my suggestion was to direct your focus to other important aspects of SEO. Go with a keyword match in your URL off your base domain, focus on those back links with great anchor text, and spend plenty of time on your on-page aspects.

With all of that you will out rank any exact match domain.

[SimonCullum]

I agree with Kyle's comments. Better off concentrating on building good quality links, plus don't forget about the all important content of course, keep it unique, relevant and interesting

[martyc]

Thanks guys.  Just one other thing to throw into the equation, if the domain was unused and only contained half the phrase but a sub domain would be an exact match would it be worth using the subdomain?

The reason I am so interested in exact match is that I have an exact domain which outranks sites which should ordinarily be above mine.

[AlanMosley]

Yes it would.

Exact match domain is best

then i would say exact match sub-domain

then split sub + doamin

even if its in the path its all good.

why not have carrentals.rentals.co.uk to avoid the risk.

[martyc]

Wouldn't rentals.co.uk/car-rentals be better than carrentals.rentals.co.uk if adding the whole phrase?

[AlanMosley]

I dont think so, domian and subdomain out rank path.

i would make that choice on the amount of content i had, if i only had one page i would not go for a subdomain.

[SimonCullum]

A good answer.

[martyc]

Yes, good point about domain outranking path.

I am looking at a new site that should have a fair amount of content so definitely considering the exact match.

One concern is that I can't remember seeing an exact match subdomain rank at the top of search engine results.

[SimonCullum]

That seems like a pretty good indication that it's better to go with the exact match domain rather than completing it with a sub domain.

A sensible URL structure and optimized Titles and Descriptions will also help.

[AlanMosley]

i certianly have, i am woking on a job right now, where we have done just what you are contemplating, and they are ranking 2 on bing and 5 on google for chosen keyword phrase, that is only partial match to subdomain. it definatly has an affect.

[martyc]

Great to hear first hand Alan.  Likewise, I can say that exact match domains hold a significant advantage.

I think I'm going to give the matching subdomain a shot since I don't have the exact match domain.