I have a new setion I'm adding to my site and from a logical typing input I'd run with a subdomain but I'm not sure how this works with Search Engines?

For example which would get better spidering?

digital.photography.com
photography.com/digital

So what's the concensus?

Hi Gaby, welcome to the forums!

I think that your best bet would be to use a combination of both pages on your main domain and third level domains (subdomains).

Subdomains are best used to separate large categories of different but related information within a site, for example, if you had a site about pets one subdomain would be for cats and another subdomain for dogs and another for fish etc. each subdomain would focus on one large category of information.

What you don’t want to do is create subdomains for small amounts of information - for example I see you have a subdomain “giving.chop.edu” that is for all intents and purposes a single page, this would be best utilized as a single page off of your main domain ie "chop.edu/giving".

Subdomain’s have been used to manipulate some Search Engine results so the Search Engines, in this case Google, do look a little more closely at subdomain’s than they do subdirectory pages. However having said that I find very little difference in the way subdomains and subdirectory pages are ranked by the SE’s. The one thing you do need to be aware of is that heavy cross linking of subdomains can get you into trouble with google.

Hopefully that helps.

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