undefined
Skip to content
Moz logo Menu open Menu close
  • Products
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Pro Home
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Home
    • STAT
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Home
    • Compare SEO Products
    • Moz Data
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis
    • Keyword Explorer
    • Link Explorer
    • Competitive Research
    • MozBar
    • More Free SEO Tools
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO
    • SEO Learning Center
    • Moz Academy
    • SEO Q&A
    • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Agency Solutions
    • Enterprise Solutions
    • Small Business Solutions
    • Case Studies
    • The Moz Story
    • New Releases
  • Log in
  • Log out
  • Products
    • Moz Pro

      Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

    • Moz Local

      Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

    • STAT

      SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

    • Moz API

      Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

    • Compare SEO Products

      See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

    • Moz Data

      Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    Learn more
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis

      Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

    • Keyword Explorer

      Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

    • Link Explorer

      Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

    • Competitive Research

      Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

    • MozBar

      See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

    • More Free SEO Tools

      Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    Learn more
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO

      The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

    • SEO Learning Center

      Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

    • On-Demand Webinars

      Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

    • How-To Guides

      Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

    • Moz Academy

      Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

    • MozCon

      Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
    Moz API

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

    Find your plan
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Small Business Solutions

      Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

    • Agency Solutions

      Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

    • Enterprise Solutions

      Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

    • The Moz Story

      Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

    • Case Studies

      Explore how Moz drives ROI with a proven track record of success.

    • New Releases

      Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

    Surface actionable competitive intel
    New Feature

    Surface actionable competitive intel

    Learn More
  • Log in
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Dashboard
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Dashboard
    • Moz Academy
  • Avatar
    • Moz Home
    • Notifications
    • Account & Billing
    • Manage Users
    • Community Profile
    • My Q&A
    • My Videos
    • Log Out

The Moz Q&A Forum

  • Forum
  • Questions
  • Users
  • Ask the Community

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

  1. Home
  2. SEO Tactics
  3. Technical SEO
  4. Are subdomains a good seo strategy for a multistore e-commerce?

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.

Are subdomains a good seo strategy for a multistore e-commerce?

Technical SEO
5
9
4.1k
Loading More Posts
  • Oldest to Newest
  • Newest to Oldest
  • Most Votes
Reply
  • Reply as question
Log in to reply
This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
  • qgairsoft
    qgairsoft last edited by Jun 21, 2015, 10:55 PM

    Hi there

    I'm wondering what is the best strategy to work with multi-stores on magento: to use or not to use subdomains?

    Suppose we have the www.website.com and we configure it to use multistore. The url base will not have the store id on it so it will not be like www.website.com/store1 and www.website.com/store2.

    It will simply rely on the user session so if we have two categories for each store it will acces using:

    www.website.com/category1 (for store 1)

    www.website.com/category2 (for store 2)

    The homepage will allways be set on www.website.com so we should have a single page for several "home pages" (depending on the user session / store he is accessing).

    I guess this is not a good option if we want to rank for different keywords (for each store).

    So I was wondering if it is a good solution to set:

    store1.website.com

    store2.website.com

    This way we have 2 "home pages" each one able to rank.

    Does it make sense? Is it good or bad for seo?

    Another option I was considering was:

    www.website.com (for store 1)

    store2.website.com (for store 2)

    store3.website.com (for store 3)

    www.website.com/blog (for blog)

    Can this work? Good or bad for seo?

    best regards

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
    • FredLebhart
      FredLebhart Subscriber last edited by Jan 24, 2017, 8:49 PM Jan 24, 2017, 8:49 PM

      I'd go with

      www.mybrand.com/store/category1/subcateory
      www.mybrand.com/store/category2/subcateory
      www.mybrand.com/store/category3/subcateory

      ...this keeps everything neatly organized for both SEO and the UX (not to mention your content management).

      I've been building professional ecommerce websites for 12 years.

      Fred

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • topic:timeago_earlier,2 years
      • BlueprintMarketing
        BlueprintMarketing @qgairsoft last edited by Jun 22, 2015, 6:48 PM Jun 22, 2015, 6:38 PM

        It seems to me that everything is going to be relevant to the sport of paintball correct?

        here is a great example of how I would set up your site changing the subdomains name to the subfolder name.

        if you want to target outside the United States you have more work. But this is where I would do for right now instead of creating a separate store your brand can become a hub for paintball knowledge and paintball guns, accessories etc. that is the way to build a brand. With people being such a fun sport you could probably attract clients by posting videos and use the sport to create a form. For people in your area.

        "using the keywords that you are going to use for your sub domains for your subfolders

        www.mybrand.com = remains with airsoft products (only airsoft content, categories, products)

        www.mybrand.com/paintball = paintball related products (only paintball content, categories, products)

        www.mybrand.com/airguns/ = if i decide to sell airguns"

        Kinda off-topic but hopefully helpful.

        Magento  Is kind of slow  when not set up properly but very configurable  I thought I would give a HHVM configuration you might want to try. https://gist.github.com/blueprintmrk/1e95e2946cabcbb8502d

        Sincerely,

        Thomas

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • qgairsoft
          qgairsoft @ClaytonJ last edited by Jun 22, 2015, 12:33 AM Jun 22, 2015, 12:33 AM

          Thank you all for the replies. So it seems the best option is to go with:

          www.mybrand.com as main website for Airsoft and

          www.mybrand.com/paintball/

          .../store3 .../store4

          thanks

          BlueprintMarketing 1 Reply Last reply Jun 22, 2015, 6:38 PM Reply Quote 1
          • ClaytonJ
            ClaytonJ last edited by Jun 22, 2015, 5:32 PM Jun 22, 2015, 12:06 AM

            Patricks suggestions I think answer your query.

            I googled airsoft and it seems strongly related to paintball & airguns. I would not recommend subdomains but keeping it on your main domain. Our experience in fashion is that the more products you have that volume exponentially increases sales. ie go with www.brandname.com/paintball

            That said you appear to be leaning towards a sub-domain. As it has completely separate customer bases.

            I would try and re-think that strategy and see if there is any way you can live with one URL. You will be dedicated to one purpose not focusing on 2 or 3.  Become the expert in airgun sports...

            Let me know if have any queries.

            qgairsoft 1 Reply Last reply Jun 22, 2015, 12:33 AM Reply Quote 1
            • qgairsoft
              qgairsoft last edited by Jun 21, 2015, 11:28 PM Jun 21, 2015, 11:26 PM

              Hi guys

              Thanks for the replys. Let's me put more details. My website so far is specialized in airsoft. My brand is airsoft related and we have hundreds of categories airsoft related and I have a good rank for airsoft related keywords.

              So my website is something like www.mybrand.com.

              Now I'm planning to work with paintball. Despite they are both "action/shooting sports", they are different, with different customers, different products, hundreds of different categories, and of course, different keywords

              I'm using magento and so far the homepage for my website is allways www.mybrand.com ... The page content (categories, products, etc.) are shown depending the store the customer has chosen. (default is airsoft page, but he can change for paintball).

              So the idea was:

              www.mybrand.com = remains with airsoft products (only airsoft content, categories, products)

              paintball.mybrand.com = paintball related products (only paintball content, categories, products)

              airguns.mybrand.com = if i decide to sell airguns

              tks again

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • BlueprintMarketing
                BlueprintMarketing @PatrickDelehanty last edited by Jun 21, 2015, 11:10 PM Jun 21, 2015, 11:10 PM

                Patrick you are fast my friend & just gave him some great resources!

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • BlueprintMarketing
                  BlueprintMarketing last edited by Jun 22, 2015, 5:32 PM Jun 21, 2015, 11:09 PM

                  I don't know why you would want to create two stores on one website?

                  If you have a store that is selling vacuum cleaners hypothetically and another that is selling weed wacker's and you do not have any relevance between the two stores e.g. they are for a separate audience.

                  are you trying to reach the same audience use one website.

                  To websites even to subdomains

                  e.g. subdomain1.example.com & subdomain2.example.com will be treated as separate domains by Google.

                  There are some things you can do to tell Google this is one site and my opinion is if you are going to simply create a headache for yourself by using subdomains un less you have a very good reason?

                  I would suggest either combining these stores into one business if you are trying to get everything on one domain. Without knowing much more about the project I can tell you that subfolders  "example.com/subfolder" tend to work much better then subdomains for passing on domain authority.

                  You want to create separate businesses create separate websites.

                  If you want to create one website that sells everything use subfolders unless you are doing geo-targeting and or other reasons that make sense for The end-user who if you are trying to target different stores on the same domain they will get confused.

                  I hope that helps,

                  Tom

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 3
                  • PatrickDelehanty
                    PatrickDelehanty last edited by Jun 22, 2015, 5:32 PM Jun 21, 2015, 11:02 PM

                    Hi there

                    Rand had a great Whiteboard Friday on this a few months back called Subdomains vs. Subfolders, Rel Canonical vs. 301, and How to Structure Links for SEO. You should also check out Should I Rebrand and Redirect My Site? Should I Consolidate Multiple Sites/Brands?

                    My first question would be if all the stores fall under the same brand? Or, are they all able to live on their own separate sites with their own branding? Reason being, if you have everything under one domain as subdirectories, everyone can benefit from the domain's authority.

                    I would review the resources above and see if those can help - there is a ton of great information. Let me know if it doesn't! Good luck!

                    BlueprintMarketing 1 Reply Last reply Jun 21, 2015, 11:10 PM Reply Quote 4
                    • 1 / 1
                    1 out of 9
                    • First post
                      1/9
                      Last post

                    Got a burning SEO question?

                    Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                    Start my free trial


                    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.

                    • See all categories

                    Related Questions

                    • SimpleSearch

                      Barba Plugin and SEO

                      Hello, community! My client wants to use the barba.js plugin for their new site. What are the implications for SEO?

                      Technical SEO | Nov 19, 2019, 11:35 AM | SimpleSearch
                      0
                    • SamaritansPurse

                      Domain Masking SEO Impact

                      I hope I am explaining this correctly. If I need to provide any clarity please feel free to ask. We currently use a domain mask on an external platform that points back to our site. We are a non-profit and the external site allows users to create peer-to peer fundraisers that benefit our ministry. Currently we get many meta issues related to this site as well as broken links when fundraisers expire etc. We do not have a need to rank for the information from this site. Is there a way to index these pages so that they are not a part of the search engine site crawls as it relates to our site?

                      Technical SEO | Feb 18, 2019, 9:38 AM | SamaritansPurse
                      0
                    • rijwielcashencarry040

                      Good robots txt for magento

                      Dear Communtiy, I am trying to improve the SEO ratings for my website www.rijwielcashencarry.nl (magento). My next step will be implementing robots txt to exclude some crawling pages.
                      Does anybody have a good magento robots txt for me? And what need i copy exactly? Thanks everybody! Greetings, Bob

                      Technical SEO | Jan 13, 2017, 3:29 PM | rijwielcashencarry040
                      0
                    • RG_SEO

                      Does a subdomain benefit from being on a high authority domain?

                      I think the title sums up the question, but does a new subdomain get any ranking benefits from being on a pre-existing high authority domain. Or does the new subdomain have to fend for itself in the SERPs?

                      Technical SEO | Feb 12, 2015, 8:19 AM | RG_SEO
                      0
                    • jamesm5i

                      "Fourth-level" subdomains. Any negative impact compared with regular "third-level" subdomains?

                      Hey moz New client has a site that uses: subdomains ("third-level" stuff like location.business.com) and; "fourth-level" subdomains (location.parent.business.com) Are these fourth-level addresses at risk of being treated differently than the other subdomains? Screaming Frog, for example, doesn't return these fourth-level addresses when doing a crawl for business.com except in the External tab. But maybe I'm just configuring the crawls incorrectly. These addresses rank, but I'm worried that we're losing some link juice along the way. Any thoughts would be appreciated!

                      Technical SEO | Jul 18, 2013, 3:41 PM | jamesm5i
                      0
                    • manintights28

                      Do rss feeds help seo?

                      If we put relevant RSS feeds on a site, will it help the SEO value? Years ago, I shied away from RSS feeds because they slowed the site down and I didn't like relying on them. However, the past couple years, the Internet has become better, especially in Alaska.

                      Technical SEO | Dec 28, 2012, 3:00 AM | manintights28
                      0
                    • stephen_reply

                      Changing DNS -- SEO implications?

                      Hey Moz, We're migrating an old site on an old server over to a new server/DNS. The plan is to keep the same URL structure and reuse our existing URL's. As long as we make minimal changes to each page's content, we should be able to update our DNS entry and get all the pages recreated and assigned to their correct URLs without any reduction in SEO rankings. Is this correct? This site gets a lot of organic traffic and ranks highly on some challenging keywords, so it's key that we retain our rankings as much as possible. I've read that it's wise to lower the DNS time-to-live to one hour, about a day before the move, to help Google crawl the DNS a little quicker. Are there any other recommendations you guys can offer or past experiences?

                      Technical SEO | Jul 31, 2014, 5:26 PM | stephen_reply
                      0
                    • BostonWright

                      Restaurant menu SEO: PDF or HTML?

                      Is it better to use a PDF or hard code restaurant menus (or any document for that matter) in HTML? I want the content to be indexed and thought PDF was the way to go for several reasons, but I wanted to get confirmation on this before I move forward.

                      Technical SEO | Aug 23, 2011, 4:30 AM | BostonWright
                      0

                    Get started with Moz Pro!

                    Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                    Start my free trial
                    Products
                    • Moz Pro
                    • Moz Local
                    • Moz API
                    • Moz Data
                    • STAT
                    • Product Updates
                    Moz Solutions
                    • SMB Solutions
                    • Agency Solutions
                    • Enterprise Solutions
                    Free SEO Tools
                    • Domain Authority Checker
                    • Link Explorer
                    • Keyword Explorer
                    • Competitive Research
                    • Brand Authority Checker
                    • Local Citation Checker
                    • MozBar Extension
                    • MozCast
                    Resources
                    • Blog
                    • SEO Learning Center
                    • Help Hub
                    • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                    • How-to Guides
                    • Moz Academy
                    • API Docs
                    About Moz
                    • About
                    • Team
                    • Careers
                    • Contact
                    Why Moz
                    • Case Studies
                    • Testimonials
                    Get Involved
                    • Become an Affiliate
                    • MozCon
                    • Webinars
                    • Practical Marketer Series
                    • MozPod
                    Connect with us

                    Contact the Help team

                    Join our newsletter
                    Moz logo
                    © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                    • Accessibility
                    • Terms of Use
                    • Privacy

                    Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.