~~~High Search Engine Rankings~~~
From: Don and Alexa Pongracz
Hi Jill,
I recently had a contract for a trade's site that specializes in trade
education. This group is under the umbrella of a non-profit
organization which includes, academic facilitation of education and a
museum, and a newspaper.
The site will now be situated as a set of pages inside a larger site
which includes An Indian Band and all its services, and the non-profit
organization and all theirs. Have they done themselves a disservice
by having a site, within a site? I think it will get lost by the
search engines?
Alexa
~~~Jill's Response~~~
Alexa,
I usually do suggest that each individual site be given its own domain
because it appears that many search engines do tend to give more
weight to the "front" pages of sites. We know from AltaVista's
excellent tutorial that they also appear to give pages in the actual
"root" directory more weight, than those in a subdirectory. That is,
a page may rank a bit better if it's URL was:
http://www.yourcompany.com/page.htm as opposed to
http://www.yourcompany.com/newfolder/page.htm.
However, it also appears that SUB domains can rank just as well as a
main domain name in many cases. That is something like
http://subdomain.yourcompany.com. If the site you are talking about
in your question is set up that way, and is written and optimized
properly, it would have a good chance of still ranking high.
Even if the pages are in a subfolder, they can still be listed in the
search engines, and they can still rank high if optimized properly.
The engines do allow these types of pages, and many of the Directories
will also allow submissions of these sites if their content is
obviously unique.
Where you may run into trouble is if you use one of the many free
servers out there such as Geocities or Tripod. These servers have
been used for many years for spam pages, so many search engines are
reluctant to add more of them to their databases.
So to sum up the answer to this question, when at all possible, do
try to have your own domain name and use the root directory. But if
that's not possible, you should still be able to see high rankings in
subdomains or subdirectories if other optimization strategies are also
in place.
Jill
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