Subdomain or directory path?
-
Hi Mozzers,
Client: Important carpet cleaner player in the carpet cleaning industry
Main Goal: Creating good content to Get more organic traffic to our main site
Structure of the extra content: It will act like a blog but will be differentiated from the regular site by not selling anything but just creating good content. The look and design will be different from the client's site.
SEO Question: Which option is more beneficial, creating a subdomain or adding a regular page within the website following a directory path URL?
If possible, please state what are the advantages and disadvantages of these 2 options in terms of SEO.
Thank you and have a great weekend everyone,
-
Thank you Joseph
-
Search engines generally treat subdomains more like a separate site then if it was in a subfolder. The downside to the subdomain is that your link juice from the main domain may not transfer to the subdomain and vice-versa. Here's a good article from Rand, a little old but still a lot of info.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites
-
Thanks for that but why is number one the best SEO practice?
-
Hi there,
Your best bet is to set the URL structure like this www.site.com/page-name rather than pagename.site.com. The first method is SEO best practice, the second way makes it seem like each subdomain is its own site.
Good luck.
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
-
Orphan Duplicate is created as Subdomain in Google Search
We noticed that some of our results on google for the blog are also come up with subdomain that is not linked from anywhere on the website. For example: SUBDOMAIN1.website.com/blog/content.html -> it redirects to website.com/blog/content.html SUBDOMAIN1 is not linked anywhere on the website. How did the google find it in the first place? Why does it still keep it in the search results? How do you get rid of it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rkdc0 -
Blog - subdomain vs. subfolderq
Hi everyone I work on an ecommerce site and I'm trying to get more content together for the site & blog. The development team want to put the blog we have on a subdomain of our site, my question is - what is better for SEO Subfolder vs. subdomain I've read a couple of articles to say subfolder is better and a subdomain needs a lot of management to build up authority itself? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
How to properly 404 pages from a subdomain
SO I am working on a site that had a subdomain that attracted a lot of spammy links. I researched the backlinks to this subdomain, and there were no beneficial links at all. I am thinking the best thing is to 404 this subdomain. What is the best way to do this? Should I just edit the DNS settings so that this subdomain does not point to the root domain? Or is there something that should be done in webmaster tools? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | evan890 -
Subdomain or folder for a section not focused on my core business
Hello there, I'm installing your analytics tool and it seems really great. I'm gonna use it for sure but I've a question that is more strategic and it's something the tool can't help me with 😛 I've a website active from 2008 and really well known in my country as a service website... we're like your "advisor" for utilities and insurances. The reason why is "savings" but really focused on utilities (broadband, gas, electricity) and check accounts or insurances. I’ve always used folders in my URLs instead of subdomains (for example www.site.com/section1 or www.site.com/section2 ). In this period I’m planning to open a new website section related to saving but not really close with what we really do in the rest of the website. This section is about coupons, vouchers and little offers. The problem is that with that section I’m going to write really a lot (a lot) of content trying to gain a lot of external links. It’s obvious that I already have a lot of contents about my core business and I’m going to write contents for original categories too. This section is anyway secondary for my business and my worry is that Google can identify me in the future as a website mainly focused on this new product. I’m really well indexed so I don’t want this decision to have any effect on my original situation. Finally the question 😛 Is it better to maintain for this section the same website structure with folders or indentify it as a subdomain to remark that it’s going to be like a totally different site with his dedicated news and all the rest? That’s why I’m evaluating a subdomain but I’m not really convinced cause subdomains can be considered as a different approach compared to original structure and of course using folder can be useful to gain root’s site rank. On the other hand, what can Google think about my core business? Thanks a lot for your help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Uby850 -
SEOMOZ crawler is still crawling a subdomain despite disallow
This is for our client with a subdomain. We only want to analyze their main website as this is the one we want to SEO. The subdomain is not optimized so we know it's bound to have lots of errors. We added the disallow code when we started and it was working fine. We only saw the errors for the main domain and we were able to fix them. However, just a month ago, the errors and warnings spiked up and the errors we saw were for the subdomain. As far as our web guys are concerned. the disallow code is still there and was not touched. User-agent: rogerbot Disallow: / We would like to know if there's anything we might have unintentionally changed or something we need to do so that the SEOMOZ crawler will stop going through the subdomain. Any help is greatly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheNorthernOffice790 -
Merging Domains... Sub-domains, Directories or Seperate Sites?
Hello! I am hoping you can help me decide the best path to take here... A little background: I'm moving to a new company that has three old domains (the oldest is 10 years old), which get a lot of traffic from their e-letters. Until recently they have not cared about SEO. So the websites have some structural, coding, URL and other issues. The sites are indexed, but have a problem getting crawled and/or indexed for new content - haven't delved into this yet but am certain I will be able to fix any of these issues. These three domains are PR4, PR4, PR5 and contain hundreds of unique articles. Here's the question... They want to move these three sites **to their main company site (PR4) and create sub domains for each one. ** I am wondering if this is a good idea or not. I have merged sites before (creating categories and/or directories) and the end result is that the ONE big site, is much for effective than TWO smaller, less authoritative sites. But the sub domain idea is something I am unsure about from an SEO perspective. Should we do this with sub domains? Or do you think we should keep the sites separate? How do Panda and Penguin play into this? Thanks in advance for the help! SD P.S. I'm not a huge advocate in using PR as a measurement tool, but since I can't reveal the actual domains, I figured I would list it as a reference point.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | essdee0 -
Large volume of ning files in subdomain - hurting or helping?
I have a client that has 600 pages in their root domain and a subdomain that contains 7500 pages of un-seoable Ning pages. PLUS another 650 pages from Sched.com that also is contributing to a large volume of errors. My question is - should I create a new domain for the Ning content - or am I better off with the volume of pages - even if they have loads of errors? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | robertdonnell0 -
Building a Large Local Services Directory - Subdomain Needed?
In 2012 we will be rolling out a directory of local services for our industry. This will ultimately be thousands of additional pages, with city/zip searching, individual provider pages etc. The main reason is for UX -- providing local resources for our industry to compliment the online experience (we're an online B2C retailer) My question is if there are pros/cons to putting this on a subdomain, or if having it on the root is ideal. I don't see a huge influx of backlinks (making a sub fine) but I suppose that could change down the road. I do see some indexing benefits for new terms like 'service x in los angeles' etc, but that would also be fine on a sub. It feels like it would be cleaner to keep separate and on a sub, but maybe we're missing something. We certainty don't want to hurt anything on our primary site which drives the business. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOPA0