SEO Question...
 

If I had a domain, lets call it States.com for sake of conversation, and I wanted to create subdomains on that domain such as Alabama.states.com , Florida.states.com... Does linking all of these subdmains together yeld any benefits and or hurt as far as the search engines go?

If it hurts, whats the best route to take with a network such as this. I know that About.com does this, but im sure they have a method far more effective, so any advice is appreciated.

How could it hurt?
when the robots gather info. from your robots.txt and if it is allowed to follow all links, then that is just more information gathered about your sites.

Remember that subdomains are considered individual sites in and of themselves. So when you start interlinking all your subdomains they all have the same IP and Whois info so you'll get very little benefit from those links.

True but I have got user activity because my subdomains where found on search engines.:thumbsup

Im not so sure that they are seen as individual site but rather pages. and deep linking is good.

which is what i was thinking if i properly setup each page with its own unique content and keywords, etc.

I'll reinforce Altheon's point...

This was a big spam technique at one point.

The general idea is that Google now treats subdomains as their own domain (I don't think this has ever been officially confirmed by Google).

You don't want lots of subdomains with little or duplicate content.

Each subdomain would be considered an individual site. Which means they all have different pageranks and different likelihood of being ranked. So if you're doing this for all 50 states, its the equivalent of doing 50 individual sites. Each of these sites would need to build their own PR / backlinks as opposed to building up PR / backlinks for a single domain.
WG

What he said...

so, based on this, if 49 of the 50 subdomains link to the 50th site, does that 50th site now have 49 backlinks? or does it not count since they are all from same IP?

not likely the links would carry much value even if they would be recognized as inbound links. just my opinion.

thanks buddy

Im not entirely sure since I don't do much of this kind of linking, but I'd imagine it would be considered as internal links. If I was google, I'd consider it that way.
WG

They will show up as backlinks, but they will not carry much weight as they would all be from basically the same IP. Each backlink is weighted for relivance.

For example, you build your site network of 50 state sites all ont he sub domains with your 49 back links.

Then I build one site and go get one backlink from a solid, established relevant site. That one link is 99 times out of 100 going to be more valuable to the page rank than the 49 you created.

always remember this rule of thumb...


quality of backlinks is more important than quantity of backlinks

there are situations where 1 really good backlink will win out over 1000 mediocre backlinks :2 cents:

so lets say you have that domain about states. What is overall better for good SERPs in case for a network kind of site where you want google to see it as parts of the main domain. Link them like this:
states.com linking to alabama.states.com, alabama.states.com linking back to states.com
or use dirs, like this:
states.com linking to states.com/alabama/, states.com/alabama/ linking back to states.com

It depends on what you want. You might want to use states.com and build up a large backlink network and hope that individual directories/sites rank well. Results in serps will be limited to 2 pages per domain. Or you could spread it out over 50 subdomains and spread the PR individually. You might still rank really well depending on what keywords you're targetting and hit more than 1 state in the serps because you'd be getting 2 results per subdomain. Its really up to the webmaster how you want to spread the PR / backlinks.
WG

No real value in the links, but value added for site depth.

IMHO, Google is a VERY rational (not to mention ridiculously smart) group of people whose main goal is to deliver relevant content to the searcher based on the chosen keywords.

Internal linking is good for SEO and for usability.

That said, Vanessa Fox, an ex-Googler (I forget her exact position), said, "Google is no longer treating subdomains (blog.widgets.com versus widgets.com) independently, instead attaching some association between them. The ranking algorithms have been tweaked so that pages from multiple subdomains have a much higher relevance bar to clear in order to be shown.

It?s not that the ?two page limit? now means from any domain and its associated subdomains in total. It?s simply a bit harder than it used to be for multiple subdomains to rank in a set of 10 results. If multiple subdomains are highly relevant for a query, it?s still possible for all of them to rank well."

Rest of that post here: Subdomains or Subfolders : Which are Better for SEO?

Not true. They are considered individual sites, and google gives the link juice to the primary domain for all the backlinks. I can see that in google webmaster tools for a mainstream site I run. I got PR3 in a month with backlinks from my own subdomains.

It's all about the context and the content. Google won't penalize you for using subdomains if it makes sense from a content point of view, and when you consider the context of using subdomains.

Yeah - try doing anal-sex.mycrappornsite.com, anal.mycrappornsite.com, teen-anal.etc.. and you probably won't get very far.

In the original post, doing something logical and non-spammy like alabama.state.com, arkansas.state.com, etc, would most like work out very well.

I appreciate everyones comments and opinions, and above was a good find :thumbsup

I thought that at first. I tried to submit a site map using top level categories as subdomains (business directory site) and google yelled at me.. can't do that as they are considered seperate sites. When I submitted site maps from each subdomain (minus all the common stuff like about us, contact us, etc, google smiled at me again :)

All the subdomains are getting indexed and ranked, and the primary domain shows solid backlinks from each subdomain. It's been that way for about two months now with no obvious problems.

There was some news on a site map/SEO list I read that Google might start accepting "hybrid" site maps that contain subdomain links and possibly even networked, directly related sites. That could be interesting to watch..

nice :thumbsup