WordPress MU

Not so much a 'howto' more a question of asking other folks for their experience.

I appreciate that the breadheads doing click-through-adverts subdomain-spam became a huge problem and the big search engines have recently developed protections against it. The basic limitations seems to be two references to the same domain or indented results.

I was wondering how search engine ranking has been affected and which is better now for genuine MU blogs; subdomains versus directories?

And how the big sites that use sub-domains fare/function like cnet.com handle this?

Subdomains, for us, are much more attractive.

We have a small specialist MU install offering blogs on one theme. By design, individuals will all be discussing the same or similar topics. I cannot see much recent discussion on the forum about this.

Subdirectories seem to work fine for me.

I did a blog post about posting to WPMU by email the other day and its 4th on Google search.

I've not paid for any search engine submissions and I've not really looked at SEO bolt ons.

It depends on your needs. Both versions get crawled exactly the same by bots. It's what they *do* with the info that is the difference.

Generally speaking, subdomains will be seen as mostly separate sites.

Subfolder/subdirectory blogs will be seen as part of the main blog, as if it were a page or blog category.