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Poll: Do you think it's better to have subsites on their own domains?

2 points by vaksel ↗ HN
Do you think it's better to have 1 big site, with subsites or a number of separate sites?

I mean if you consider everything from coverage to SEO, to acquisition talks.

So, if you have 1 big site, it'd be:

    http://google.com
    http://google.com/mail
    http://google.com/voice
Pros I see, that you get a ton more SEO juice this way, since everything goes to that one domain. And all your users are in one place, so for PR you can say "oh yeah we have alexa rank of X and X million users".

Or do you think it's better to have these on their own domain?

   http://google.com
   http://gmail.com
   http://googlevoice.com
Pros I see that you basically can boost the # of your uniques, by counting the users who use multiple services twice. + it makes that much easier to spin off/sell off certain sub portions of your site.

So which do you think is better?

2 comments

[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 17.3 ms ] thread
jacquesm
From an SEO point of view it is better to have them all in one basket, if you think you are ever going to spin off or out one of the projects then they should be on a domain in their own right.

Also, it is much harder to market a large number of domains, think of it as trying to market a large number of brands at the same time. You'll have to split your budget.

ScottWhigham
I have a lot of experience with this actually. I had 20 domains all wrapped under the moniker "The LearnItFirst Training Network". These were all subsites that were focused on teaching/training one specific topic:

* LearnSqlServer.com

* LearnSharePoint.com

* LearnCSharp.com

etc

After four years of getting emails from confused users, I moved everything to one domain -> http://www.learnitfirst.com. After the first 90 days, I haven't gotten a single "I'm confused..." email (the first 90 days after the move saw a bunch of, 'Wait - what happened to LearnXYZ.com?").

I voted one domain