Question

Topic: SEO/SEM

Is A Sub-domain Considered Less Important?

Posted by Anonymous on 9/20/2007 at 2:21 AM ET 500 Points
My hosting company offers up to 6 websites hosted for the one low price. I created a website which is ranking very well and have now created a second site (unrelated in topic) to the first site on the same hosting plan. I now realize this second website is considered a sub-domain of the first website according to my CPanel, although they have completely different domain names. Will this 2nd site be considered of lesser importance by the search engines or is this whole sub-domain thing just visible to me in my CPanel? Should I move the 2nd site to a separate new hosting plan? Would appreciate advice from any SEO experts out there.

Many thanks - Lindsay
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RESPONSES

  • Posted on 9/20/2007 at 4:40 AM Member
    Subdomains are separated by dots and have similar names. e.g.

    www.art.com and www.art.class.com are subdomains.

    Different names are considered different sites.

    (Info is given by my computer-expert and collegue Babis. He is 90% sure it is correct).

  • Posted by Jay Hamilton-Roth on 9/20/2007 at 8:20 AM Accepted
    You might be confusing subdomain with the folder structure of your website.

    As antonia noted, a subdomain is a name that comes before your domain name. In the case of www.google.com, there's also images.google.com, maps.google.com, etc. Each of these are websites in their own right, but their names share the domain name. Search engines see these as their own website. Subdomains are a handy way to organize a logical "entity" of a website.

    The folder structure is how the websites are organized on your web hosting server. If your package provides 6 websites, then it's probable that each domain's files & folders are kept in a single domain folder (which in turn, is kept in a folder for you, the hosting user). At the "top level" of your web hosting folder, you'd have a different folder for each domain.

    The cpanel allows you to map a folder to a (sub)domain.

    You DO want your different (unrelated) websites to have different domain names as a start of your "branding".
  • Posted by iFocus on 9/20/2007 at 10:23 AM Accepted
    A subdomain is anything that replaces the www in a domain name, forum.domain.com is a subdomain, www.forum.domain.com is not.

    Maybe do you want to talk about an addon domain instead o f a subdomain. An addon domain is a fully functional domain that can be created from within your control panel. You can manage it the same way you do for your main domain on the account.
    The addon domain will exist inside the public_html directory of your account with the folder name you choose for it upon creation.

    This site https://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=2317 might give you the answer you are waiting for with regards to site's submission to search engines.


  • Posted by excellira on 9/20/2007 at 11:00 AM Member
    Sharing an IP address does not indicate that the second site is a subdomain or is not serious. Most inexpensive hosting is shared IP. I have seen web servers host over one million sites on one server sharing an IP address. This does not indicate that any one of those sites is related to another.

    It is true that having a dedicated IP is ideal (but not necessarily from a rankings standpoint) but sharing one is unlikely to harm you unless...

    If you have a number of sites on the same IP which have the same registry info and theme then this can look suspicious. Especially if they are linking to one another. Or the sites on the server are mostly spammy.

    A subdomain would be structured in the following manner:
    Primary: https://awebsite.com
    A subdomain: https://www.awebsite.com
    Another subdomain: https://forums.awebsite.com
    And https://blog.awebsite.com

    I think the best way to resolve this is for you to post the URL for both sites and we can take a look. We're really guessing at things until we see what is really going on.

    I hope this helps.

    Best Regards,

    Greg Hill
  • Posted on 10/17/2007 at 2:42 PM Member
    I have used subdomains for services in local cities and have gotten very high rankings on page 1 for competitive local terms.

    Frank
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