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Folder Sites
May 04, 2006
In the comments on my initial post about the 50 Affiliate Sites Challenge, Knox asked,
"I have a question about your statement in your post "...standalone sites, as well as self-contained sites in folders and subdomains (making things much easier on the wallet)." The obvious benefits that you mentioned aside, what are the pros and cons to mini sites in a domain folder versus having them with their own domain?"
I started writing an answer in the comments but it got kind of long so I thought I would turn it into a post instead.
First, though, a disclaimer. I am not an SEO expert. I'm just basing this on what I've observed, with both my own sites, and other people's sites. I might be right on the ball with this, or I might be so far off track, one of you will have to come find me and hand me a map and a flashlight this time next year.
So here are my thoughts on having "folder sites" on an already established domain.
In addition to the cost benefits (and since I'm planning on getting 50 sites up and running, those $8.95 domain names do add up), here's what I figure are some other benefits.
First, if you believe in the whole sandbox theory (which I do), if your established site isn't sandboxed, then neither will your new folder be sandboxed.
Second, there aren't any crosslinking issues. You can link from your main domain to a folder in that domain, and back again, without having to worry about Google penalizing you for excessive crosslinking. In the meantime, though, you treat your main site, and your folder site(s) as regular sites, and you build up backlinks to each just as you would if each one was on its own domain.
Third, you can name your site's folder anything you want, which is handy for optimization purposes (and is something that gets harder and harder to do these days when you're looking to buy a domain name with a keyword in it).
(Note: I don't know whether my points one or two above apply to subdomains. I haven't used very many subdomains, although I've got a couple of sites I'm planning on using to test some things out on.)
The negatives of having "folder sites"? Well, I wouldn't want to rely on having one or two domains on which I stick virtually everything, because there's a huge risk.
The main disadvantage (and while it's only a potential, it's a hefty risk) is that after any given algo change, your search rankings for a domain may go tumbling down. For whatever reason (which you're probably not going to be able to figure out).
And usually when that happens, it's a domain-wide thing. So you might be happily chugging along, with some nice income earning folder sites that are doing well all within one domain that Google happens to love at the moment, only to wake up the next day, after an algo change, to discover all of your pages on that domain, regardless of folder, can be found on page 10922 of the search results for all of your keywords (at the bottom of the page, no less).
There are also some smaller disadvantages to having folder sites, like the fact that internal links don't have the same pagerank clout as inbound links do. You can really benefit from having 50 sites all on their own domains combined with some careful, well-thought-out on-theme linking going on between them. I'm also not sure whether directories will let you submit the same domain name, but a different folder, more than once.
So those are my thoughts on folder sites. I do like the idea, but I wouldn't want to build folder sites all the time.
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Posted by BJ at 07:24 PM in SEO | Permalink
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Comments
So does that mean that subdoamins count as individual sites for the challenge? :)
I'm still a little scared to crosslink subdomains in one site together - have heard of penalties - but that was just in various forum discussions so who knows.
Here's one interesting thread on it:
http://www.associateprograms.com/discus/ftopic11743.html
Posted by: jenn | May 8, 2006 4:14:32 PM
