The way I was thinking would be that each subdomain site would have a persona of its own, they may not really link to each other in a logical way either - the generic name would be there as a ‘brand’ if you like.

I understand exactly what you are saying though, and put that way I can see the merits in having an umbrella site with the sub sites coming off it.

Thanks again for all the hard work you are putting into this!

Thank you for the nod on the series - The next week or two will be very interesting and enlightening when I start to talk about category tree building etc.

In regard to the domain name and subdomains. Search engines view the domain as the authority ie: mywebsite .com, if you were to add carseats.mywebsite .com, the engines will actually view this as a completely separate site, thus losing any benefit of the parent. You would be better using mywebsite .com/carseats/ and install the software into a separate directory for each niche you want to build off of it.

ALL link juice will be spread back to the parent domain versus different and individual subdomains.

In my opinion, you would be better served on a site like this to use a blog like wordpress as the main page, then create a horizontal link structure across the main header section that links to each individual shopping section.

Mark

I have a good generic domain name ideal for auction sites, to make a niche site I can use sub-domains thereby adding my niche wording at the start of the generic domain name.

Is there anything you can think of that would cause this to be a bad idea?

Thanks for the excellent info - the fact you are not charging makes it all the more credible in my eyes.

Anyways… I think I found a good niche! Thanks for the guide! It refreshes my memory every time I make a new bans site.

For BANS sites - I think the majrity of the traffic is going to come from search engines and referral marketing.

If you can get a good .com, I would jump on it. If however it is not available, I wont hesitate for the .net or hyphenated domain names, the convert well also for the traffic source.

Mark

Very good tip!

Like yourself, I really dont have a definitive answer on what a specific manufacturer/owner would like or dislike. They do however have legal rights to pull the sites down, possibly with fines.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark#Trademarks_and_domain_names

If you visit www.DNForum.com, there is an entire forum section devoted to just that, the risk associated with infringement, including cases where owners like you and I were slapped!

ALL being said, as long as you do not go overboard and present your site as the manufacturers, you likely wont get bothered. If you DO get a letter… its a quick shut down.