SEO impact - using subdomains to make a sentence

Question

I'm thinking about playing with subdomains to make "sentences", and I would like to know if there is any impact on SEO.

That's easier to explain with examples (those are fake ones and only illustrates the idea):

• Will http://this.is.a.test/ be disadvantaged comparated to something like http://this-is-a-test.com/?
• Will http://you.can.do.it/ be disadvantaged comparated to something like http://you-can-do-it.com/?

The idea here would be to buy the domain do.it and create the subdomain can.do.it, and then you.can.do.it.

Will it consider you, can, do and it as separate words and as an expression?

The question is NOT about the impact of country extensions.

Answer 1

Exact Match Domains e.g. cars.com when SEO targeting "cars" are greatly diminished in effect these days after an update a couple of years ago (background: http://searchengineland.com/library/google/emd-update )

This means there is probably not a great advantage beyond usability and branding reasons to have the keyword mentioned in the domain. The problem with an usualy situation of sub-sub-bdomains you propose is that user's will probably not remember and start searching for its normal equivalent, but if you are consistent with your own internal links and sharing URLs, you could have any number of subdomains. I know of one example with sub-sub-domains written by Tad Chef here: seo2.0.onreact.com , although he noindex's his site from Google so can't use it to check SEO performance :)

Bear in mind though, that each subdomain will be treated as a new website, so for example if you changed between you.can.do.it and you.cant.do.it in your site structure then you will negatively affect your SEO, its much better to keep it consolidated on one domain.

Technically, you can have any URL structure you like and still rank well if all the other considerations are covered, URLs and domains are low priority compared with the myriad of other SEO you can do, based on my 8 years working in an SEO agency for big brands.

Answer 2

There's no direct SEO benefit for doing this. However, if you are trying to rank for those keywords in that order this can benefit you SEO-wise in an indirect manner. Webmasters tend to use the keywords in URLs in the anchor text of their links. This means when linking to your site, they may use those words in your domain as the anchor text in that link. Obviously that has SEO benefits.