When does it make sense to use a subdomain?

I've setup an online user's guide / support pages as a subdomain and I think that may have been a mistake (SEO related anyway).

The subdomain (support.mysite.com) does not get picked up by the search engines. It seems that I should have just made it a part of my regular site so that the content and traffic would have been "automagically" noticed.

What do you think?

Google for examples view subdomains as separate domains. Google is looking at your site like two separate domains. An easy way to repair this is to add your support section onto your main domain example yoursite.com/support. Then with the subdomain just add a re-direct to yoursite.com/support and update all the links on your main site so you don't lose traffic.

This arrangement is often used for extremely busy sites. A visitor types in: "www.busysite.com", and a mechanism called load balancing sends the visitor to one of the available computers (say, "www2.busysite.com" or "www7.busysite.com").

Get a new domain, they are cheap at $1.89

Keep it a subdomain it will get picked upped.

Subdomains are commonly used by organizations that wish to assign a unique name to a particular department, function, or service related to the organization.

Search engines see subdirectory just that鈥搒ubdirectory of the website鈥檚 domain. Basically, what that means is that the subdirectory belong to the site鈥檚 main domain or subdomain, which again is a different website from the 鈥榤ain-domain鈥?

So, if the main-domain has high page rank (PR), the page rank gets distribute throughout the subdirectories within the main-domain; but the subdomain does NOT, however, feel the PR love from the main-domain . This is, again, because the subdomain is a different website from the main-domain.

When you should use a subdomain? Ok, ill make it simple.

Basically, you have a site about motorbikes. You're advised to construct a subdomain if lets say you intend to delve deeper and talk about dirt bikes.

So you'll make a subdomain eg. dirtbikes.motorbikes.com Easy enough to understand? Basically, SEO wise, it makes sense to use a subdomain only when you have something different to potray yet it is of relevance to your main site.

In contrast with the example above, you might even want to use a subdomain like accessories.motorbikes.com. Hope those two couple of examples are easy enough to understand. SEO wise, it helps because google index's your subdomains with relation to your main domain/site. :) So if its only like you explained "support.mysite.com", google would only be treating like a subdirectory like the person above has mentioned.

Hope that info has helped you, and for more info for these kinds of matters, dont be shy to visit : http://easy-free-make-money-online.blogs... :)

If you have a very large site and if you want to get more categories in your site to be able to submit in different directories or sites, subdomain will be more advisable.