[SEO Questions] PageRank; domains, subdomains, subfolders and links.
 

Greetings GFY.

First of all; I'm pretty new here so you probably haven't seen me around just yet. So yeah... hi! :)

The past days I've been reading up on SEO articles, but there are just so many diffrent opinions, and so much stuff I found seemed to be very outdated. So instead of getting a headache of looking up each subject with over 9 milion diffrent opinions and explanations I thought I'd make a thread on GFY.

Let's say we start the adult website "porn.com" and we have 40 diffrent categories; for example Asian, Anal, BBW,... with multiple pages for each category. What would be the best structure to build the pages?

#1 -----
1. Subdomains: asian.porn.com, anal.porn.com, bbw.porn.com,...
2. Subfolders: porn.com/asian/pages.html, porn.com/anal/pages.html, porn.com/bbw/pages.html,...
3. Mainfolder: porn.com/asian.html, porn.com/anal.html, porn.com/bbw.html (and additional pages with numbers i.e. anal2.html, anal3.html

#2 -----
How does Google treat the above structures? Are subdomains, subfolders or just pages in the maindirectory considered as a part of the domain porn.com? Or does it count subdomains and subfolders as seperate websites?

#2.1 ------
What if we assign a new domain name to a subdomain or subfolder? Is there any diffrence how search engine will treat it compared to site.domain.com ?

#3 ------
If we link from a subdomain or subfolder to another subdomain or folder, or the mainsite even will it count as a valid backlink? Or is there any penalty for interlinking?

4# -----
Let's say we decide to use the subfolder structure for the categories (porn.com/anal/pageshere.html).
What if we exchange links to those subfolders? A random site links to our subfolder porn.com/anal. Will that backlink count for the maindomain porn.com? or only for porn.com/anal?

5# -----
Can we start a seperate site on a subdomain, assigning a new domain name to it, and have it treatened as a seperate site?

Sorry if some of the questions share the same answer - The answers are probably pretty obvious once the basics have been answered. I'd like to get some up-to-date answers to my questions, so please don't link me something that was written in 1999 :p

Thanks in advance <3

I would suggest trying all of the above on several different sites and find which works best for you.

I do know that subdomains are treated as individual sites by search engines unless there is a link to the subdomain from the main domain.

There is no "penalty" for linking subdomains to subdomains or subfolder to subfolder. In my opinion, if done correctly this is encouraged by search engines.

Experiment and observe, I think that's the key to SEO.

Good luck!

on your #1 question.

I preferred this setup.

3. Mainfolder: porn.com/asian.html

:2 cents::thumbsup
I've seen people succeed with either setup and others failing with the same methods... As John said - It's all about seeing what works for you

Thanks for the replies so far. I think I've managed to create some kind of structure in it. However, one main question remains regarding backlinks. Do backlinks to a subfolder count towards the number of backlinks for the top-level domain, or will only the subfolder benefit from it in terms of PageRank?

Thanks in advance

I would go with subfolders.

Subdomains are treated like seperate websites. subfolders are not, so they get a little bit of the PR from your pages that have higher PR if they link to the webpages in your subfolder. same for pages. if you put your sub categories in different directories it will be ( a little bit ) easyer to get SE traffic to them, since you can put more keywords in your URL. PS: Use mod_rewrite!

subdomains are treated like completely new sites. subfolders are not. see 2.0

if you link to another subfolder this is consider as normal. since it is in the same website.
If you link from another subdomain, this is consider as a backlink from another site. as long as no blackhat techniques are used and you don't overdo it you won't get penalized for it

That backlink will give a small % of the PR from the site that sends it to that page. part of the PR of your porn.com/anal/filelinkedto.html will be also spread to any links to your other pages.


I'm not sure if I understand your question correctly, so please clarify, but, :

subdomains are always considered to be a different site. :)

Thank you for your informative reply 4pleasure. Would you personally suggest to only send traffic to the top-level domain, or are we safe to trade traffic and backlinks with other sites using our subfolders (categories) as link destination without too many losses for the main page (porn.com/index) in term of PR?

Hey there, sorry for the late reply. Yes I recommend you spread your backlinks amongst all your different categories/subfolders. don't worry about the index page PR since you will get more traffic doing that.

For example if you only do general ( high competition keywords ) backlinks to your index page you will not get a lot of traffic ( in the beginning, depending on how well you do your SEO ) even with a high PR.

If you do some backlinking also for your categories and target some nice longtails ( example : word1 word2 word3 ) you will get more traffic since those usualy have less competition.

Working like this you will also be able to get more 'linkjuice' from dropping your link in linkdumps since you will be able to add links like this :

http://www.somedomain.com/category1/girl.html
http://www.somedomain.com/category1/couple.html
http://www.somedomain.com/category2/nicegirl.html

One more thing about backlinking : start slowly, make it look naturaly. If from one day to the next you all of the sudden have 200 backlinks you will most likely get sandboxed.

Hope this helps you get on your way!

Thank you once again, too bad we can't give user reputation on this board :(

That indeed would be cool board feature :)

It is possible. Our board at mmowned.com (vBulletin aswell) got a reputation feature, it's also very handy in terms of trusting people, since you build up very positive or negative reputation :)

Welcome to gfy, Tamashi. I think it's best to experiment with what structure works best, and where you get good results. I think you have to test out different variations, and see which one gives the best results.

just another search engine optimization marketing technique that I know works...

example :

setup sub domains like asian.porn.com and have a new domain like asianporn.com for that sub domain and so on with all your categories set them up as sub domains and buy a new domain for each sub domain... make your keywords as close as possible to the category/sub domain and new domain all 3 ;- )

then you get create your own Page Rank and cross link your sites with A-B-C linking and add targeted TEXT content to each niche... example - title or description of movies..etc..

lastly build a directory (on another domain) and link to all your new domains... continue to build more directories and one - way link exchanges work best..

if you can put each new domain and sub domain on a separate host with different c-class ip's this works best for PR and back links... (host and ip)


Sub domains are treated like separate websites use this to help create multiple listings/sites in search engines... hit me up if you need any help :)