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The Art of SEO
book

The Art of SEO

by Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, Rand Fishkin, Jessie Stricchiola
October 2009
Beginner content levelBeginner
602 pages
19h 50m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from The Art of SEO

Root Domains, Subdomains, and Microsites

Among the common questions in structuring a website (or restructuring one) are whether to host content on a new domain, when to use subfolders, and when to employ microsites.

As search engines scour the Web, they identify four kinds of web structures on which to place metrics:

Individual pages/URLs

These are the most basic elements of the Web—filenames, much like those that have been found on computers for decades, which indicate unique documents. Search engines assign query-independent scores—most famously, Google’s PageRank—to URLs and judge them in their ranking algorithms. A typical URL might look something like http://www.yourdomain.com/page.html.

Subfolders

The folder structures that websites use can also inherit or be assigned metrics by search engines (though there’s very little information to suggest that they are used one way or another). Luckily, they are an easy structure to understand. In the URL http://www.yourdomain.com/blog/post17.html, “/blog/” is the subfolder and “post17.html” is the name of the file in that subfolder. Engines may identify common features of documents in a given subfolder and assign metrics to these (such as how frequently the content changes, how important these documents are in general, or how unique the content is that exists in these subfolders).

Subdomains/fully qualified domains (FQDs)/third-level domains

In the URL http://blog.yourdomain.com/page.html, three kinds of domain levels are present. The top-level ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780596809133Errata Page