Forum Moderators: phranque
What I am concerned about is how to set it up. My host sets it up so that each subdomain goes to a different folder. Right now the files are in my root folder and if I start adding new folders for each subdomain, I'm concerned that it will be just one big mess and that the spiders will be indexing it incorrectly.
Am I concerned over nothing or should I make sure that each subdomain gets their own folder and move everything from public_html to a new folder before the site goes live?
I'm able to add subdomains using the cpanel that was supplied with my hosting package. It's a simple process really, you tell it what you want the subdomain to be called (I.e. CA), it then creates a subfolder in public_html for you named CA. All url requests to ca.whatever.com are then sent to the root of public_html/ca/
I'm not sure what will happen if the folder CA already exists when you add the subdomain though.
So anyway, to answer your question: Yes, you will need a subfolder for each subdomain, which can get pretty messy. Just make sure subdomains are the right choice. Each subdomain that you create is treated as a different website to the search engines, so you'll need to build links and market each of your different subdomains.
I don't really care how messy it gets as long as it's easy for the search engines to crawl.
Search engines don't see the messiness. They see links and they follow them. They neither know nor care how those links are mapped to folders. However:
Subdomains, as far as search engines are concerned, are different sites. For that reason you should take care to limit the amount of duplicated content accessible through the different subdomains. Try to ensure that every page you serve has a single canonical URL, if possible. So if widgets.com/canada points to the same page as ca.widgets.com, for example, you should use a 301 redirect from one of these two addresses to the other, so that search engines know both are the same page, and don't penalise you for duplication.
