Does your site contain subdomains? If so, you may be reducing your potential by not taking advantage of something that's being referred to as "the Amazon Effect."
Many confused webmasters believe that creating hundreds of subdomains linking to one main domain will cause an increase in the main domain's PageRank. However, although this alternative to a link exchange strategy might sound appealing, it will most likely prove to be not only tedious but ineffective. Why? One minor problem is that some hosting companies will charge you an extra fee per each subdomain. Even if you don't have to pay an extra fee, there are other problems with this strategy. Because each subdomain is viewed separately from your actual domain in the eyes of the search engines, the subdomains would also be ranked separately. Therefore, unless you are willing to put a lot of time and effort into making sure each and every subdomain ranks well on its own, it probably wouldn't do you much good. For example, the LinksMaster.com link exchange program sometimes hosts its members links pages on unique subdomains. Each of those individual subdomains have hundreds of thousands of unique backlinks pointing to them from sites outside of the LinksMaster.com domain, so they hold more value.
If you're one of the hundreds of thousands of website owners who don't have the kind of time, effort, and money to put forth into creating successful and well-ranked subdomains, you'd be better off creating folders instead. The use of folders instead of subdomains could potentially boost your number of inbound links, increase your amount of content and make your site look like more of an "authority" site. This technique has become known by search engine optimization professionals as "the Amazon Effect," after the popular website Amazon.com. The Amazon.com site is so jam-packed with folder after folder of content, on such a wide variety of topics, that it has become an authority site. It seems that almost any new page added to the Amazon site will find instant success, despite lack of PageRank and only a few (if any) backlinks.
SEOGuy, who originated the phrase, has this to say about his Amazon Effect theory: "Larger websites covering a larger breadth of topics, especially when themed such as specific hotels in geographical areas, get a lot more credit in the rankings. They are seen as an authority. A small site does not have this luxury. What you are doing [by creating subdomains] is creating many small sites with the subdomains, each one seen as not very important, and this a LOT harder to rank.
"Google is finicky about subdomains. Sometimes they are unique domains; sometimes they are part of the collective. However, this much is sure: a subdomain gets no ranking benefit from its association with the root domain."
A member of the SEOGuy forum believes adding subdomains will only "dilute the power of the primary site." According to Dreamshop, "having a site with high page count and fresh content will go a lot farther in boosting your serps than trying to use subdomains just to get that keyword in your URL."
Fresh or updated content - and lots of it - will help your site reach authority status. It helps to have multiple pages of strong content in your site's area of expertise. Incoming links from sites with similar content or a related theme will also prove to be helpful in boosting your site's PageRank. One way to get instant inbound links is to join the LinksMaster.com link exchange program, which offers exclusion filters for relevancy and gives its members the option to approve their linking partners.
Regardless of whether or not you use a link exchange strategy, if you decide to create subdomains as a means of boosting your site's PageRank, be sure to invest plenty of time and effort into those subdomains to make them worthwhile. There's nothing wrong with having subdomains. Successful sites such as Yahoo (not to mention most free hosting sites) use subdomains that certainly rank well.
If you're going to create a subdomain, here are a few rules of thumb you should follow:
- treat it like a separate site with fresh, relevant content
- optimize all pages on the subdomain just like you would with a regular site
- get plenty of inbound links to help boost PageRank in Google and the other search engines
- use your target keywords and keypyhrases in your subdomain name. Separate keywords with hyphens. For example: keyword-keyword.yourdomain.com
