such a good informative poster....

trying to get back into the forums after a long long hiatus...

But is the benefit that you will get from having a keyword-rich domain name enough to hinder your company's branding? The name of your company is permanent and it plays a major role in first impressions of all your visitors, word of mouth marketing, viral marketing, etc ... Sure having keywords stuffed in there might be a little beneficial in the SERPS, but so can ten extra backlinks.

Otherwise all of the big companies would be doing it ... Amazon.com would be called cheap-online-bookstore.com and eBay.com would be called online-auctions.com. There's a reason they don't

Check out this post of mine from 2004 => http://www.daniweb.com/forums/post40716-9.html
It's rather old but IMHO it still applies.

lol..... branding is seprate from ranking.... you can always have the branded domain as a standalone or even have it redirect to the other

I was under the impression that if you have a branded domain 301 redirect to the real deal, then Google will discount the redirected domain in favor of everything related to what it's pointing to. And if you don't use a 301 redirect, then that's duplicate content?

> branding is seprate from ranking
That's my point When choosing a domain name, choose it because it is brandable and not because it could marginally help you with a keyword or two.

The all point is this one........

(1) if all the website is regarding a single keyword (cats) I don't need any subdomains probably. I can have more folders anyway....... example

mydomain.com/food-for-cat
mydomain.com/home-for-cat

BUT ... suppose that my url has nothing to do with cat....
is not better ...........

food-for-cat.mydomain.com
home-for-cat.mydomain.com

????????????????


(2) suppose that my website is about cats AND alligators!
suppose that my url has nothing to do with cats.... AND alligators....

In this case I think is better definetely use subdomain....... then............

cats.mydomain.com
alligators.mydomain.com


In my case I'm now using just folder but thinking to do somethign also with subdomain.... will see.......

Hey cscgal,

I have a question that haven't seen addressed anywhere so I thought I'd throw it by you.

We have a "gray-label", cobranding partnership program where websites will refer to a brand-specific subdomain of our site as a way to offer an ecommerce element without having to assume fullfillment overhead costs, etc. How it works is the partnering site will point any e-commerce links on their main site to us via a web address something like: "theirbrand.ourbrand.com" with a site name of "Their Site--Powered by Our Site".

We block these subdomains from being spidered, since they're most often a mirror image of our core site, just with a different theme. So from my understanding, there's no evidence to SEs that these subdomains are even part of the picture for us. I've recently begun to worry that we're losing out on some significant search engine benefits for having highly relevant, respectable sites
link to our content--that we're missing out on the link popularity piece of SE algorithms. Is this a valid concern? Is there a better approach to integrating these co-branded subdomains into our family?

Thanks for any insight you might have.

DM