Microsite on subdomain vs. subdirectory
-
Based on this post from 2009, it's recommended in most situations to set up a microsite as a subdirectory as opposed to a subdomain. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites. The primary argument seems to be that the search engines view the subdomain as a separate entity from the domain and therefore, the subdomain doesn't benefit from any of the trust rank, quality scores, etc. Rand made a comment that seemed like the subdomain could SOMETIMES inherit some of these factors, but didn't expound on those instances.
What determines whether the search engine will view your subdomain hosted microsite as part of the main domain vs. a completely separate site? I read it has to do with the interlinking between the two.
-
I think the footer is the best way to interlink the websites in a non-obtrusive way for users. This should make your main corporate site your top linking site to each subdomain - and this is something you should be able to verify in a tool like Google Webmaster Tools. I do not have any specific examples to support this, but this is a common web practice.
This is not 100% related, but Google recently suggested using Footer links as one way to associate your web content with your Google profile account:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1408986
So you can figure if Google looks to footer links to associate authorship - they would likely do the same to relate sites together.
-
Hi Ryan,
Your question is quite interesting. I, myself, went through the article one more time. I have no facts to back up the following, but I hope that it will contribute. FIrst I would go and validate them on webmaster tools. If they are inteded to hit a certain market, I will select that geographical location. Also, I think you have litte to worry about. I imagine that google won't pass certain trust to subdomains, depending on the site. If the number of subdomains is considerable, I would say that they have pretty slim chances of getting some push from the main site. Take for example free webhosting services. They could rank and have decent page rank, if people show interest to the particular subdomain, but is highly unlikely taht to be caused by the authority of the main site.
I haven't seen free hosting subdomain rank well for a long time now. On the other hand you have student and academic accounts on university sites. They all go with subfolders and rank pretty well for highly specific topics. If I have to give a short answer, I would say that is the type of site that makes the difference for google. If your site is considers a casual business website and you are developing a new market then you might not have a problem. If you use sudbomains for specifying product, then you might be ok again.
Google use subdomain for all their major products. For Google pages they used a separate domain. They now redirects to a subdomain sites.google.com. However, they will never give subdomains for personal use. There might be something to that. They do a 301 redirect from a subdomain on googlepages.com to sites.google.com/site/. So what they offer is a 301 redirect to a sub-sub folder, located on a subdomain on Google.
-
Ok. That makes sense. The way our company would use it is having a microsite for specific, focused topics - large enough that warrant their own site. They are clearly part of our overall brand, unlike the Disney properties example. On each of these sites, there will almost always be a link back to the main/corporate website, usually in the footer.
Do you think having one or two links on every page pointing back to company.com would be sufficient to notify search engines that the two are associated, and ultimately give some search value to the subdomain hosted microsite from the main domain?
Are there any studies or evidence supporting any of this?
-
Interlinking is definitely a factor - but content is what matters.
Take the Disney brands that live on Go.com:
They all live on Go.com but Google surely knows they are really separate sites that cover different topics. Same for any blogspot.com, typepad.com, etc. hosted blog. The millions of blogs there cover a wide range of topics and search engines understand that they are not related just because they share the same host domain.
On the other end of the spectrum - if your site just has two subdomains - let's say www.website.com and blog.website.com ... which cover the same topics and link to one another, search engines would more likely associate those two addresses.
-
I don't have an answer to your question, but if you're looking for some more reading about subdomains vs. TLDs, here is a presentation given at MozCon: http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/mozcon-international-seo/. The slideshow has some info about it, and a bunch of other good stuff.
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
-
CcTLD + Subdirectory for languages
Hey, a client has as .de domain with subdirectories for different languages, so domain.de/de, domain.de/en, domain.de/fr etc. hreflang Tags are implemented, so each subdirectory of each language references to the other languages, so for domain.de/en it is: My question is about the combination of ccTLD + language subdirectory. Do you think this is problematic for Google and should be replaced with .com + language subdirectory? We have lots a high quality domains (from countries with corresponding languages) linking to .de/de and .de/en, some links on .de/fr & .de/es and 0 links pointing to .de/cn. Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | Julisn
Julian0 -
Do I need a separate robots.txt file for my shop subdomain?
Hello Mozzers! Apologies if this question has been asked before, but I couldn't find an answer so here goes... Currently I have one robots.txt file hosted at https://www.mysitename.org.uk/robots.txt We host our shop on a separate subdomain https://shop.mysitename.org.uk Do I need a separate robots.txt file for my subdomain? (Some Google searches are telling me yes and some no and I've become awfully confused!
Technical SEO | | sjbridle0 -
Blog on subdomain of e-commerce site
Hi guys. I've got an e-commerce site which we have very little control over. As such, we've created a subdomain and are hosting a WordPress install there, instead. This means that all the great content we're putting out (via bespoke pages on the subdomain) are less effective than if they were on the main domain. I've looked at proxy forwarding, but unfortunately it isn't possible through our servers, leaving the only option I can see being permenant redirects... What would be the best solution given the limitations of the root site? I'm thinking of wildcard rewrite rules (eg. link site.com/blog/articleTitle to blog.site.com/articleTitle) but I'm wondering if there's much of an SEO benefit in doing this? Thanks in advance for everyone's help 🙂
Technical SEO | | JAR8970 -
Duplicate content vs. less content
Hi, I run a site that is currently doing very well in google for the terms that we want. We are 1,2 or 3 for our 4 targeted terms, but havent been able to jump to number one in two categories that I would really like to. In looking at our site, I didn't realize we have a TON of duplicate content as seen by SEO moz and I guess google. It appears to be coming from our forum, we use drupal. RIght now we have over 4500 pages of duplicate content. Here is my question: How much is this hurting us as we are ranking high. Is it better to kill the forum (which is more community service than business) and have a very tight site SEO-wise, or leave the forum even with the duplicate content. Thanks for your help. Erik
Technical SEO | | SurfingNosara0 -
Understanding page and subdomain metrics in OSE
When using OSE to look at the **Total External Links **of a websites homepage, I dont understand why the page and subdomain metrics are so different. For example, privacy.net has 1,992 external links at the page level and 55,371 at the subdomain level. What subdomain? www redirects to privacy.net. And they have 56,982 at the root domain level - does that mean they have around 55k deep links or what?
Technical SEO | | meterdei0 -
Http:// vs http://www.
Why is it that when I run an "On Page Optimization Keyword Report" for my website I get a different score when using http://www.tandmkitchens.com vs http://tandmkitchens.com. My keyword is "Kitchen Remodeling" http://www.tandmkitchens.com scores an A http://tandmkitchens.com scores a B It's the same page yet one url scores higher than the other. Any help! Thanks
Technical SEO | | fun52dig
Gary0 -
Page Analysis Difference Between Root and Subdomain
I have a site where the canonical version is the subdomain www, with a permanent redirect to ensure this is so. When I do a page analysis from the MozBar for the domain I see that www and *.domain are both displayed, with numbers from *.domain being shown by default in the mozbar. Does MozBar show *.domain numbers by default, and do I correctly understand that the (higher) www numbers displayed in page analysis for www are valid and a result of my canonical strategy?
Technical SEO | | waynekolenchuk0 -
Keywords in file names vs folder names
We understand the value of a keyword phrase included in the URL. Is there more value to having that phrase in the folder name of the URL or the file name or does it matter? Example: http://www.biztoolsone.com/website-design.php or http://www.biztoolsone.com/website-design/ Which is best? Thanks, Wick Smith
Technical SEO | | wcksmith0