subdomains for a big site

[cinemaeye]

I have searched the forums here and found some subdomain discussion, but not exactly what I'm looking for.

I am curious as to what impact subdomains have for search engines.

My site is getting kind of big and different people are coming to the site for different things. I run the entire site on one CMS. But what I want to do is have subdomains for some of the different sectons.

For example, we have a popular column called Hitch Daily. The column will still appear on our main page every day, but I want there to be a dedicated page for it somewhere on the site. So if I set up a subdomain (http://hitch.cinemaeye.com) I am wondering how it will affect things.

Does it hurt the site? Benefit the site? Am I better off with http://www.cinemaeye.com/hitch/

Thanks in advance for your help.

[Cutter]

Its a tricky issue simply because the SEs are constantly changing. The right answer today might be the wrong one tommorow. I'm not even sure if there is a right answer here.

A lot of people would recommend an entirely seperate domain name. But you may want your main site to benefit from the incoming links as well.

Subdomain or not? In December I was watching one search engine spammer use subdomains to rank really high for a ton of keywords. I came back from Christmas and he was no where to be seen.

I know of an extremely successful search engine optimizer who uses the http://www.cinemaeye.com/hitch/ thing. I can't tell you exactly why, but after seeing what he made last year, it sure isn't hurting him.

[cinemaeye]

Thanks for the info. And I do own the domain hitchdaily.com, but I want to keep it all on one server since it uses the same cms as my main site. Do you think it would be a help or hindrance if I used the domain and did a redirect to cinemaeye.com/hitch?

[stymiee]

There's no real difference between the two. Subdomains are typically used when a sub-section of a website is large enough to require its own server. Otherwise it is just to make the webmaster happy. From a search engine point of view both are equal. The keyword in the subdomain will be spotted and recognized just as well as if it werea subdirectory.