Question
Hi all,
I'm going to be building a brandy-new website and, in addition to my brandy-new domain name, will have some subdomains available for me to use ... but I don't know what they would be good for / used for. Can anyone explain in simple english what I might use them for or what good they are, and maybe give an example or two?
I have a similar question (what are they used for/good for) regarding email forwarding .......
Thanks!
Answer
Subdomains are mostly a convenient way to organize your space. It can help your viewers navigate and remember where they were, too. For example, if you sell house plants, you might use subdomains: plants.yourdomain.com and instructions.yourdomain.com.
Are real life example would be Microsoft. Their website is huge. They use subdomains like support.microsoft.com for troubleshooting.
Email forwarding is handy in some cases. If you use it with rules, you can forward all sales inquiries to one person, support questions to another. You can use it if you are on vacation and want another person to handle the email without giving them access to your account.
Answer
In the past, I read where search engines penalize or at least subrogate portions of a website that use secondary domains. And just yesterday I read a discussion about it where they raised the issue of confusion and name dilution.
The confusion comes about given the order of things, people should remember the company name first and foremost, but when you have that prefix there, that may take precedence in the minds of your visitors. They argued that "domain-name.com/support" would be better, as it keeps the domain name right up front.
Having your own domain is better for search engine ranking than using a sub-domain such as "me.shopping-mall.com" or "shopping-mall.com/me" but I will confess, using sub-domains may be useful where disparity might be of some benefit. Some examples of that might be presentations of your website in different languages or locale, english.domain.com vs french.domain.com or us.domain.com vs au.domain.com and of course, as "J" just said, subrogation based on function.
Seems like I'm repeating Jayne a lot here lately. Its all good though.