Sub Domains and user behavior

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Sub Domains and user behavior

how to setup a subdomain and avoid issue of user still wanting to add www

uprightcomm

8:37 pm on Jun 14, 2007 (gmt 0)

We are setting up sub-domains for a print campaign for our client. They are wanting to setup something like subdomain.example.com and this link will appear in their print publications. They have a concern, however, that some users may still want to type the www on the beginning of this URL. In other words, if they say "For more info, check out our site at http://subdomain.example.com." they are afraid that users will still type "http://www.subdomain.example.com".

In my opinion, I doubt that hardly anyone would add the www at the beginning, but you never know. My idea is to setup a sub-sub domain (fourth level domain? not sure what it would even be called) and 301 it to the real subdomain.

Would this work? If so, would it affect SEO negatively at all?

Thanks in advance for any tips.

[edited by: encyclo at 2:13 am (utc) on June 17, 2007]
[edit reason] switched to example.com [/edit]

encyclo

2:17 am on Jun 17, 2007 (gmt 0)

It is always good practice to cater for all eventualities when dealing with type-ins - so yes I would agree with your idea to create a www version of the subdomain and use a 301 redirect. It will have no impact in terms of indexing.

You should also seriously consider buying and redirecting subdomainexample.com (no dot) and subdomain-example.com (with hyphen), as you may find that both could be typed by users unfamiliar with subdomains.

getxb

11:52 am on Jun 17, 2007 (gmt 0)

It will be interesting to know what percentile of the visitors will actually be typing [subdomain.example.com...] by mistake. OR .. what is the probability a visitor instead of typing [subdomain.example.com...] will type [subdomain.example.com....]

pageoneresults

12:44 pm on Jun 17, 2007 (gmt 0)

I'd say the probability is high that a large percentage of users are going to type in the www before anything. Heck, I do it myself on occassion. It is just so natural to type that www.

There are all sorts of ways to approach this. You could advertise the sub-directory www.example.com/sub/ and redirect that to a sub-domain sub.example.com. You may also just add a short keyword to the end of the root domain that redirects the user to their destination.

A sub-domain with just a few pages may not perform well at all. Typically you use a sub-domain when you have a very broad range of products and/or services and you need to provide focus and separate environments for each one of those.

Personally I feel using sub-domains in advertising can be a problem. Following the advice above to accommodate for those incorrect entries is an absolute!

From an SEO standpoint? As I stated above, if there isn't sufficient unique content on those sub-domains, they may not perform like you'd expect them to.

getxb

1:25 pm on Jun 17, 2007 (gmt 0)

Thanks a lot for your valuable thoughts pageoneresults.

Today I mistakenly typed a famous blog address: http://www.example.blogspot.com instead of http://example.blogspot.com and surprisingly it didn't redirect me to http://example.blogspot.com (yup it was blogspot) http://www.example.blogspot.com did open. Google don't think of redirecting the visitors to http://example.blogspot.com and I wonder why!

Isn't that a case of duplicate content too?