Subdomain for every us state?
-
Hi,
one of our clients has an idea of making subdomains from his main website to sell his online advertisements in all states in USA.
f.e:
He wants to have a subdomain for every state and there to be information related only or mainly to this state?
I am not sure about is this a good idea? What is your opinion about it?
-
If the domain is has an extremely high authority (80+), I would consider it due to potential to dominate the SERPs by getting the www.web version and state.web version both to rank high.
Thanks, the domains authority is 43, it is not so high.
_Yes, stick with folders. It's much simpler and much better organization (states correct as Atlanta a city). _
Yes, it is true, thank you!
Next, I second everyone else, subfolders are much more organized, subfolders look better, and subdomains are an old SEO strategy (a little spammy, especially for a new domain)
It is an old domain (registered 1994). What guys you mean by better structured? Sorry if it is a simple question, I just want to be sure if it is what I think.
Also if a web site is in subdomain, does the main domain still pass some authority to the subdomain or not much?
-
I would stick with folders for two main reasons:
- First, yourdomain.com is part of your online brand. If every state's URL is statename.yourdomain.com, I think this takes away from your brand because the first thing people see when they look at the URL bar or in search results is a state name and not your URL
- Next, I second everyone else, subfolders are much more organized, subfolders look better, and subdomains are an old SEO strategy (a little spammy, especially for a new domain)
-
Yes, stick with folders. It's much simpler and much better organization (states correct as Atlanta a city).
-
subfolders are better than subdomains, it's all under one site instead of 59 (according to obama) individual subdomains.
that was an old school strategy when Google really gave push to having the keywords in the domain name and spammers took advantage of it to rank better by creating subdomains for each keyword phrase
-
I would advise against it.
I would stick them all in subfolders of the www version of the site. www.web.com/texas
If the domain is has an extremely high authority (80+), I would consider it due to potential to dominate the SERPs by getting the www.web version and state.web version both to rank high.
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 -
Homepage keeps disappearing and reappearing for important keywords every few days
My homepage keeps disappearing from the SERPS for my most important keywords. My home page has been in number 2 position for years. When the home page disappears it will not even show in a Google search for my business name although it is still indexed. When the home page is not showing an internal page shows instead but in position 6. When the home page is back the internal page does not show. There are no issues being reported in Google Webmaster. When I realise that it's down I do a fetch as Google and request reindexing. No idea if this is bringing it back or not? We are so worried about this and totally at a loss. As are the three SEO companies I've called. Would really appreciate it if someone could give some advice. NSFW https://goo.gl/dwA8YB
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GemmaApril1 -
UK version of site showing US Cache and meta description
Hi Fellow Moz'ers We seem to have an issue where some of our UK site is showing meta descriptions from our US site in the serp's and when you check the cache: of the site it's brining up the .com instead of the .co.uk site. example: cache:https://www.tinyme.co.uk/name-labels shows the US site We've checked the href lang tags and they look ok to me (but i'm not an expert) https://www.tinyme.co.uk/name-labels" hreflang="en-gb"/> https://www.tinyme.com/name-labels" hreflang="en-us"/> https://www.tinyme.com.au/name-labels" hreflang="x-default" /> https://www.tinyme.com.au/name-labels" hreflang="en-au"/> We've had a search around and seen people have similar issues, but cant seem to find a definitive solution.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tinyme1 -
PDFs and images in Sub folder or subdomain?
What would you recommend as best practice? Our ecommerce site has a lot of PDFs supporting the product page. Currently they are kept in a sub domain and so are all images. Would it be better to keep them all in a subfolder? I've read about blogs being hosted on a subfolder to be better than subdomain but what about pdfs and images? thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
Disavow Subdomain?
Hi all, I've been checking and it seems like there are only 2 options when disavowing links with Google's tool. Disavow the link: http://spam.example.com/stuff/content.htm Disavow the domain: domain: example.com What can I do if I want do disavow a subdomain? i.e. spam.site.com I'm also assuming that if I were to disavow the domain it would include all subdomains? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Carlos-R0 -
Subdomain or New Domain or Directory path?
Hi Mozzers, I have a dilemma here. I have one of my clients that has its American website and would like to promote its business in canada(2 locations only vs more than 40 in the u.s). What would be the best SEO decision here for the 2 Canadian locations: should i go for a new root domain? if yes why (www.example.ca) a new subdomain? if yes why (ca.example.com) or just following a directory path solution under the american site? (www.example.com/canadiancity) Thanks Ty
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
The use of subdomains to improve SEO?
A clients website which provide a number of trade services which have a page for each service they provide for example: carpentry or electrician or plumbing etc. currently these pages are found at domain.co.uk/bathrooms/ bathrooms.html I am trying to optmise each page better as they are competing with other sites who for example sell bathrooms rather than bathroom installers or plumbers. As part of the on page optimisation I plan to change the page names and directory structure. I had an idea to split the website down into subdomains for various sections i.e for all their services Create a sub domain such as http://plumber.domain.co.uk 2.) upload the relevant content (in this example the plumbing page) to the sub domain location 3.) correct all the links to absolute URLs for each sub domain / Will this help target better use of keywords in the URL in terms of SEO efforts ? hope it makes sense thanks Darren
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bristolweb0 -
Create new subdomain or new site for new Niche Product?
We have an existing large site with strong, relevant traffic, including excellent SEO traffic. The company wants to launch a new business offering, specifically targeted at the "small business" segment. Because the "small business" customer is substantially different from the traditional "large corporation" customer, the company has decided to create a completely independent microsite for the "small business" market. Purely from a Marketing and Communications standpoint, this makes sense. From an SEO perspective, we have 2 options: Create the new "small business" microsite on a subdomain of the existing site, and benefit from the strong domain authority and trust of the existing site. Build the microsite on a separate domain with exact primary keyword match in the domain name. My sense is that option #1 is by far the better option in the short and long run. Am I correct? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | axelk0