Hey, hi, can anyone explain what people do with an awful lot of subdomains, or asking the other way round, why do some hosts offer that many subdomains, I mean like 20 or 50 or 100 or 200 subdomains...

Is there any "normal" use one can make of this? Is the idea that the account holder can give sub-accounts to his friends or something? Isn't that a bad business for the host, in the end?

Basically the more domains you have pointing at your site the more search engines will point visitors at it!:D

Originally posted by big allan
Basically the more domains you have pointing at your site the more search engines will point visitors at it!:D Maybe, in 1999. Today, having a bunch of similar sites on subdomains pointing at your main domain is likely to be considered spamming by search engines and to get your site penalized or removed. At the very least, links from your subdomains will have little significance in your link popularity rating.

Personally no, I've never seen a 'normal' use for more than a few subdomains. From memory the highest I've seen is around 8 or so (some pointed, some subdomains proper).

If someone can asking for 50-200 subdomains I'd probably be quite interested in what they had planned for them :)

Greg Moore

Of course the subdomains should not point to the main site, but instead to subsites, targetted at what the subdomain is about. Although it has been a while since I was involved in search engine positioning I think many engines still favors domainname and rank it higher, that is

keyword.domain.com ranks higher than

www.domain.com/keywords


Also to me subdomains make a site look more professional when you have for example

forum.domain.com

instead of

www.domain.com/forum

I use about 20 subdomains, right now. Most of them are for space I've given friends on my domain. I'll setup a private FTP account and a subdomain for them and then they can upload their own site.

The remaining subdomains I use to organize content on my website. My domain is mainly graphic design related, so I have portfolio.website.com and photography.website.com, etc. Like ASPCode said, I think it just makes the URL and site look more professional.

You could easily use up quite a few sub domains by organizing different sections of your web site into different sub domains.

So for example instead of yourdomain.com/reviews/ you could have reviews.yourdomain.com, etc.

Originally posted by ASPCode.net
Of course the subdomains should not point to the main site, but instead to subsites, targetted at what the subdomain is about. Although it has been a while since I was involved in search engine positioning I think many engines still favors domainname and rank it higherSo that approach might be used to improve positioning of individual pages of your own site. But while you say "Of course the subdomains should not point to the main site," the post to which I was referring implied that it would: "the more domains you have pointing at your site the more search engines will point visitors at it."

I take that as a recommendation for gateway pages on subdomains directing visitors to the main site. That, my point is, would not be an effective strategy.

Many of our customers also regularly use sub domains.

we would use them to organize many parts of our site. Since we run a Nintendo site, we would have like nintendo.nin-gaming.com gameboy.nin-gaming.com snes.nin-gaming.com ect ect (about 8 systems total)

this would also help if you only wanted certain groups to work on certain areas. For instance, we have a certain group of people who "only" work for the gameboy section. Their ftp access only works for that subdomain. It would help look more professional, and better security.

This was all in our plan, but we don't feel like spending the extra money to do this :-) We use sub folders instead

I used to use subdomains for organization purposes as well. But now I get to use cpanel which doesn't allow me to choose which directory the dang thing points to so my web directory'll get all crowded. I always though subdomains were useful for shortening the url so someone could get to:
http://this.com/something/something/subdomain/
by going to:
http://subdomain.this.com

Hello
There is not much evidence that using keyword subdomains will get you a higher search engine ranking these days.

Neither do unique IP addresses.

The only things that will are:

1. relevant content

2. money

With item #2 becoming increasingly important.

Gordon

something to consider about sub-domains vs. subdirectories...

If the customer is typing the URL in their address bar and either mis-types or can't remember the exact URL, a subirectory will at least get their request to the web server, where it can be handled by a 404, possibly re-directing them to the correct URL, whereas the mis-typed sub-domain may result (depending on how it is configured) in a DNS lookup failure and the request may not even get to the server. Or if it does, may end up being handled by a virtual-host you were not expecting.


There are advantages and disadvantages to both ways of doing things, but many times those doing them do not consider all of the issues involved. In the final analysis, ease of use for the customer should be the primary consideration IMHO.

Originally posted by astra4
Hey, hi, can anyone explain what people do with an awful lot of subdomains, or asking the other way round, why do some hosts offer that many subdomains, I mean like 20 or 50 or 100 or 200 subdomains...

Is there any "normal" use one can make of this? Is the idea that the account holder can give sub-accounts to his friends or something?

I know a guy which have domain from.md and his subdomains are very popular ;)


Isn't that a bad business for the host, in the end?
But for majority of cases you can't see full statistics just for your subdomain. And you can't have separate control panel for that subdomain.

If the customer is typing the URL in their address bar and either mis-types or can't remember the exact URL, a subirectory will at least get their request to the web server, where it can be handled by a 404, possibly re-directing them to the correct URL, whereas the mis-typed sub-domain may result (depending on how it is configured) in a DNS lookup failure and the request may not even get to the server. Or if it does, may end up being handled by a virtual-host you were not expecting.

Actually if you make a DNS entry like:

* in CNAME domain.com

Then anyone typing in a subdomain that doesn't exist will be sent to the domain's front page.

Gordon

Originally posted by GordonH


Actually if you make a DNS entry like:

* in CNAME domain.com

Then anyone typing in a subdomain that doesn't exist will be sent to the domain's front page.

Gordon

It depends on the configuration. It may happen that someone typing in a sub-domain that doesn't exist will wind up at the front page of the default domain for the IP address of the parent domain. In a virtual hosting environment, that may or may not be the front page of the parent domain though. It could be the front page of your competition.

Again, it all depends on how it is set up, but things can happen that you were not anticipating, especially if it was not well thought out.

Subdomains makes it look more professional almost some people ilke them because they're shorter.

then youve got sites like ******** (*shudders at ****ness*) and go.to which use them as free redirection sites