Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Should we stream videos from a subdomain or subfolder?
-
This is causing some hand-wrangling and I need some help.
Let's say we were developing rich video content for our products and our agency is hosting the content on a new external server. There are already plans to link to these videos from product detail pages, category pages, and landing pages on our main website: www.example.com.
Would it be better to create a new subdomain or to use a subfolder with a reverse proxy technique for this video content? It's not truly a microsite and will not have a gallery page to navigate the various videos.
For example, would it be better to use this: video.example.com/
...or this (executed with a reverse proxy
www.example.com/video/Of course, regardless of whether this new content will live on a subdomain or within a subfolder, we plan on creating a video Sitemap using guidance from Justin Hammack in this terrific post.
-
Thanks, Phil! I really appreciate your insights.
-
Cool.
To be honest, it really doesn't matter a great deal. i would be inclined to go down the subdomain route - just because it makes it easier if you want to shift things up and move them to another domain later on, but that's entirely personal preference.
Often video files are hosted on totally different domains, such as when you're using a 3rd party player and hosting solution and it doesn't seem to make any difference with regards to getting good video results.
-
Totally correct.
-
Hey Ryan,
I'm just want to be clear that i understand what you're planning here. Are you going to embed the videos on product pages across the site, but are wondering whether the actual video files (the .mov/.mp4 files) should be held on a subdomain or subfolder?
Thanks,
Phil
-
I believe it doesn't matter as the only concern is speed and it has nothing to do with SEO.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Ecommerce store on subdomain - danger of keyword cannibalization?
Hi all, Scenario: Ecommerce website selling a food product has their store on a subdomain (store.website.com). A GOOD chunk of the URLs - primarily parameters - are blocked in Robots.txt. When I search for the products, the main domain ranks almost exclusively, while the store only ranks on deeper SERPs (several pages deep). In the end, only one variation of the product is listed on the main domain (ex: Original Flavor 1oz 24 count), while the store itself obviously has all of them (most of which are blocked by Robots.txt). Can anyone shed a little bit of insight into best practices here? The platform for the store is Shopify if that helps. My suggestion at this point is to recommend they all crawling in the subdomain Robots.txt and canonicalize the parameter pages. As for keywords, my main concern is cannibalization, or rather forcing visitors to take extra steps to get to the store on the subdomain because hardly any of the subdomain pages rank. In a perfect world, they'd have everything on their main domain and no silly subdomain. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alces0 -
Why does Moz recommend subdomains for language-specific websites?
In Moz's domain recommendations, they recommend subdirectories instead of subdomains (which agrees with my experience), but make an exception for language-specific websites: Since search engines keep different metrics for domains than they do subdomains, it is recommended that webmasters place link-worthy content like blogs in subfolders rather than subdomains. (i.e. www.example.com/blog/ rather than blog.example.com) The notable exceptions to this are language-specific websites. (i.e., en.example.com for the English version of the website). Why are language-specific websites excepted from this advice? Why are subdomains preferable for language-specific websites? Google's advice says subdirectories are fine for language-specific websites, and GSC allows geographic settings at the subdirectory level (which may or may not even be needed, since language-specific sites may not be geographic-specific), so I'm unsure why Moz would suggest using subdirectories in this case.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdamThompson0 -
My client wants to apply schematic markup to their iframe youtube video. Is this possible?
I have a client that wants to apply video object schema to their iframe youtube video. Here is the source code: <iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/clientvideo" width="272" height="202" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe> Is it possible to apply schema markup to this kind of iframe source code? Our development team was having a hard time with it. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
How can I get Bing to index my subdomain correctly?
Hi guys, My website exists on a subdomain (i.e. https://website.subdomain.com) and is being indexed correctly on all search engines except Bing and Duck Duck Go, which list 'https://www.website.subdomain.com'. Unfortunately my subdomain isn't configured for www (the domain is out of my control), so searchers are seeing a server error when clicking on my homepage in the SERPs. I have verified the site successfully in Bing Webmaster Tools, but it still shows up incorrectly. Does anyone have any advice on how I could fix this issue? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cos20300 -
Subdomains vs directories on existing website with good search traffic
Hello everyone, I operate a website called Icy Veins (www.icy-veins.com), which gives gaming advice for World of Warcraft and Hearthstone, two titles from Blizzard Entertainment. Up until recently, we had articles for both games on the main subdomain (www.icy-veins.com), without a directory structure. The articles for World of Warcraft ended in -wow and those for Hearthstone ended in -hearthstone and that was it. We are planning to cover more games from Blizzard entertainment soon, so we hired a SEO consultant to figure out whether we should use directories (www.icy-veins.com/wow/, www.icy-veins.com/hearthstone/, etc.) or subdomains (www.icy-veins.com, wow.icy-veins.com, hearthstone.icy-veins.com). For a number of reason, the consultant was adamant that subdomains was the way to go. So, I implemented subdomains and I have 301-redirects from all the old URLs to the new ones, and after 2 weeks, the amount of search traffic we get has been slowly decreasing, as the new URLs were getting index. Now, we are getting about 20%-25% less search traffic. For example, the week before the subdomains went live we received 900,000 visits from search engines (11-17 May). This week, we only received 700,000 visits. All our new URLs are indexed, but they rank slightly lower than the old URLs used to, so I was wondering if this was something that was to be expected and that will improve in time or if I should just go for subdomains. Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | damienthivolle0 -
Pros and cons of video onsite or youtube
what are the pros and cons of placing videos on the native website as opposed to pushing the you tube channel? If I move the youtube and vimeo to the native website will i loose all the link juice? is there an easy way to have transcript of the audio as html in the site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bakergraphix_yahoo.com0 -
301 Redirect of subdomain?
Fellow Mozzers, I'm having a hard time wrapping my brain around a redirect issue and thought it was worth posing the question to the Moz community. I did a search first but couldn't find the exact answer I was looking for. How does a 301 redirect work when you redirect a sub domain example.homepage.com to www.homepage.com but you keep the sub directories of example.homepage.com/page-1 active and are trying to rank them? I'm dealing with a current project where this is happening and this doesn't make sense to me, to redirect the subdomain if you're also trying to rank/create search traffic for pages, sub directories on example.homepage.com. This also get's into the debate of if a sub domain site is viewed as it's own website and therefore has to rank itself. If this is true, it seems like we're kind of killing the authority of the site by redirecting it. Additionally, www.homepage.com has a much stronger link profile than example.homepage.com I hope this makes sense. Any thoughts are appreciated. Thanks for your time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SMG-Texas0 -
Franchise sites on subdomains
I've been asked by a client to optimise a a webpage for a location i.e. London. Turns out that the location is actually a franchise of the main company. When the company launch a new franchise, so far they have simply added a new page to the main site, for example: mysite.co.uk/sub-folder/london They have so far done this for 10 or so franchises and task someone with optimising that page for their main keyword + location. I think I know the answer to this, but would like to get a back up / additional info on it in terms of ranking / seo benefits. I am going to suggest the idea of using a subdomain for each location, example: london.mysite.co.uk Would this be the correct approach. If you think yes, why? Many thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webrevolve0