When i launched my first money making blog , I was testing the idea of setting up multiple subdomains within a domain , doing this i can save my cost because domain name nowaday is getting more expensive especially with the recent adjustment in domain price across different domain name registra.

Hence i launched my first site as a subdomain under a generic domain . The subdomain name is the product name that i am targeting. After few weeks of adding good contents , finally my site is being ranked at page 16 by Google for the product name .It was yoyoing around page 16 to page 20 in the past few weeks.I am happy and content because i haven't do any link building yet , once there are more inbound link for the targeted keyword , the ranking shall be improve .

And out of curiousity , i bought another domain name which is close to the product name i am targeting . I installed Wordpress blog and leave it there without any contents and no on page optimization at all

So now i have 2 websites targeting the same product name , once is under a subdomain and another one a brand new domain.

The new site has been indexed by Google 1 week later (i just leave it there untouched for 1 week) Guess what ? it was ranked at page 5 (exact match) for the product name, with no contents , only the default Hello world post by wordpress, no on page optimization , no what so ever wordpress seo plugins , It outranks my subdomain site which has quality contents , on page seo and yet still struggling between page 15 and 16 . Page 5 with no work at all and Page 15 with hard work ?

Google treats subdomain and domain equally but when comes to SEO and niche marketing , buying a domain which includes the targeted product name/keyword is much much more better than setting a subdomain .

A lot of SEO Experts will advise to get a domain instead of subdomain , i don't really undertand the reason behind until i try them out myself.Overally i am pretty happy with the experiment , each small improvement bringing me closer to my $1 a day target :).