Here are the results of my December and January testing. The primary goal of this testing was to figure out if there was any benefit to building a blog front-end for all my keyword sites.To keep this as “scientific” as I could, I did this on new unique domains/IP’s and used the same keyword lists in varying niches, and I used the same indexing procedures.Here’s what I found:
Test: Multiple subdomains, differing topics. One WP blog on main domain vs. WP blog home page on each subdomain.
Result: No significant difference in indexing speed or number of spider visits. CTR’s and income were a little higher when WP was not used as home page for that subdomain.
Test: Multiple subdomains vs. multiple subdirectories.
Result: Indexing was much slower using subdirectories than with subdomains. Subdirectories seemed to almost eventually catch up, but not fully. Note that this testing was done with keyword topics that varied. My perception is that using subdirectories is not a negative if they are on related topics.
Test: Subdomain vs. individual domain:
Results: Inconclusive. I think it varied by keyword. Overall, unique domains of mine seem to outperform subdomains, but I don’t have hard evidence. An individual domain will do better than individual subs, however with the added efficiency of building subs, that seems to be the better strategy.