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I am trying to find out the best route to take with a multi-tenant environment that will share the same code base on a server and still get good SEO.

I can either do football.exposurevents.com or go with exposurefootballevents.com. Is there a downside with doing the subdomain? Less professional? It still has my keywords for Google.

The reason I am wanting to do the subdomain is because on Azure you only get one SSL certificate, and I would like them to share the same cookie, but I dont want to hurt SEO.

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    If each site has unique content, I do not see a difference except for the expense of domain registration. Google does now ties sub-domains somewhat loosely with the parent domain while still treating each sub-domain as a separate site as they ahd before. In this case, some value is passed to the parent though limited. But then again, with unique domains, each domain can perform completely on their own and not effect the parent domain. In your case, since the edit, it appears that sub-domains may the way to go. – closetnoc Oct 9 '14 at 15:59
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I would go with topic.example.com or example.com/topic and not a separate domain for each topic. Basically, use the silo approach. This will allow each topic to rank on its own without being too diluted. Also, having your keywords in the domain does not proved very much SEO value now a days.

P.S.

While topic.example.com or example.com/topic are both sound SEO structures, keep in mind that sub domains require a lot more maintenance, more work if you move the site and somewhat tricky analytics tracking setup.

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  • Sounds good, these sites arent going anywhere and the maintenance will be easy since it shares same db/code, just more targeted per subdomain. – Mike Flynn Oct 9 '14 at 19:31
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    Make sure you setup your analytics properly if you are going the sub-domain route. You can track all as one domain and then create separate views or segments OR you can track them individually. – dasickle Oct 9 '14 at 19:41

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