I was wondering if the search engines treat subdomains as separate sites?

And, would it be a good idea to use subdomains to break up your real estate site.

For instance...

buyers.domain.com
sellers.domain.com

Would google or any other SE penalize for using subdomains that all link back to your main site?

TIA,

Richard

As long as your not using duplicate content there's no problem with subdomains.



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Rich
VTWS Real Estate websites are among the top lead
generating Real Estate Websites in markets across the United States for Realtors and Companies alike.
Real Estate Search Engine Optimization

In my experience Google treats all subdomains as part of one big site so the link pop of the main domain is passed along to the subdomains - just like subdirectories. So, there nis not problem with having them all link back to the main domain.

Google actually treats sub domains as new websites.

It would be much better if you create your pages in the same domain and place them into folders. This way you are increasing the size of your website and giving more authority to it.

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Real Estate Web Design - [b] 30 Day Free Trial

That they do but I believe that it also causes a problem pertaining to the credit that googles gives to those links from the Subdomain if hosted on the same C- Block.

Some of us believe that links coming from the same C- Block is discounted by G.



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The Best Real Estate Agents in Las Vegas and Atlanta in the Las Vegas Real Estate Market Atlanta Real Estate Market offering Las Vegas Homes for sale and Atlanta Homes

Las Vegas,

I'm not 100% sure if your theory is correct but it does make one wonder. I will actually do a real live test to see what happens. Will post my results and all documentation of how the test was done within about 2 to 3 weeks.

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Real Estate Web Design - 30 Day Free Trial

have seen this before. building up an authority site like agentserver said will definatly help you rank better in the long run. Main reason for this is after you have lots of backlinks and are an authority site, when you do some optimization for another keyword it takes a lot less work because google gives your site more weight because your an authority. In our tests we've found that it's easier to rank non subdomained and that you gain more authority and easier to gain ranking for other keywords.

my research shows that google regards it as the same site, especially if on the same IP.

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Real Estate Web Design

I agree with AgentServer:

What search engines do today, may not be what they do tomorrow. So if they are treated as 2 different websites today, you may be building your "promotion" on this pretense.

Now what happens tomorrow when they now treat it as one site? And how will all the different search engines treat it? Some may, and some may not.

Now the problem I see is if they are 2 different sites, you have twice as much work to do promoting the 2 different sites... back-links, traffic, SEO. Why not spend all that time and energy into promoting one site. The same amount of work will get you more then twice the results.

If you REALLY want them treated as 2 different sites... build 2 different sites with 2 different domain names so there won't be any confusion.

i know this is an old post, but was something i tested, and have some medicore results. intend on putting on a new test site, to see what that reveals.
i use a service from no-ip.com
i created a website dropship.sytes.net
sytes.net is one of their free domain names you can create a subdomain off of.
this may sound like fiction, and truly it was an anomoly to me as well.
from the no-ip service, i pointed the subdomain to my webserver, created a hosting account, loaded the index.html file.
and no sooner i had it loaded, google was indexing it, could have just been it was that time, strange. anyhow, the dropship.sytes.net was ranked number one on google in less than 12 hours. wowsa,
amazing. the site did fall down to # 50 during the week, but next time google came by and indexed the site, back to the top it went.
that site was launched mar 2, currently holds #6 position on the keyword seach "wholesale dropshippers" but has quite a few # 1 positioned keywords as well "find wholesale products" is a number 1 out of 5,400,000, not too bad.

so it is my belief that subdomains from an established domain, could be a positive factor.
i am going to launch a real estate site using the same sytes.net domain, but using a subdomain of my choice, and will let you all know how it goes.

later,

i can plain tell you from experience on this and ive been at this since 1996, google or any other search engine will treat www.whatever.whatever.com
as a domain unto itself, where as a sub domain like this www.whatever.com/whatever it will treat as a sub domain and will not get as much notice.

One of our large client sites with hundreds of static XHTML pages had content that was roughly 60% real estate and 40% golf courses in the area.

The on and off page SEO relating to real estate was great, but the site was not achieving the rankings that I thought that it should have at that point.

With so much of the site dedicated to golf (and no off page SEO pointing to the golf pages) I felt that the golf pages were diluting the actual purpose of the web site - real estate.

So I set up a sub domain devoted to the golf content. Within one month the SERP's had met our goals, and soon after that they began their continued domination of the market.

Is this definitive proof? No - it's just one site. But I do believe that it did help by focusing the theme of the domain and the sub domain.