Subdirectories vs subdomains
-
Hi SEO gurus
Anyone has input on what's better?
blog.domain.com vs domain.com/blog
store.domain.com vs domain.com/store
etc
I think the subdir (/xyz) will concentrate authority on the same subdomain so should be better? However sometimes it is tidier on the server to maintain online stores or blogs in a separate strucutre so subdomains work better in that sense. I just want to make sure that doesn't affect SEO?
Cheers!
-
Thanks for the responses Yumi, @oznappies & Aaron
-
Sub directories/folders used to be the definite way to go for the most SEO value however things have evened out for the most part. I think sub directories are more user friendly... we are used to the slash... extra periods can get tricky.
-
I've asked this one on here before and have some test sites trialling both ways and the sub-directory gains rank much faster from the root than the sub-domain.
-
in my opinion? definitely subdirectory. and in fact it will still be tidier on the server maintainability ..
For example please consider the following setup
you have your MYDOMAIN.com located at /var/www/html-mydomain
and by using a SUBDOMAIN.MYDOMAIN.COM, you will generally have them at /var/www/html-subdomain-mydomain
it looks tidier as you said it BUT you can achieve exactly the same thing using MOD_REWRITE
so perhaps right now your MYDOMAIN.com/SUB is located at /var/www/html-mydomain/SUB right? you can actually write a .htaccess that whenever user is going to MYDOMAIN.com/SUB it actually load the page under /var/www/html-subdomain-mydomain instead ! (so the server maintainability between using the subdirectory and subdomain will be exactly the same)
a much more technical example , put this inside your .htaccess of your root domain home directory
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^[www\.]*sub-domain-name.domain-name.com [NC] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/sub-domain-directory/.* RewriteRule ^(.*) /sub-domain-directory/$1 [L]
This will cause the following situation
when people go to http://sub-domain-name.domain-name.com/a.html AND http://domain-name.com/sub-domain-directory/a.html
both of them will open your /sub-domain-directory/a.html instead
hope this help
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
-
Does having dots in my brand name hurt my SEO? ie: BoatU.S. vs BoatUS ?
Our official brand name has dots in it and we're wondering if having those dots will hurt our organic ranking and (or) lead to a mis-interpreted crawl by the bots..
Technical SEO | | BoatUS0 -
Impact of Non SEO Subdomains
My company has several subdomains whose specific purpose is to act as a landing page/site for our paid search and/or email program. One of the things I've noticed on these subdomains is that they are not being excluded from the SEObots. Could the lack of proper SEO techniques on these subdomains impact our main www subdomain? What is the proper configuration we should use to make sure these sites are not considered for SEO?
Technical SEO | | APFM0 -
Anything new if determining how many of a sites pages are in Google's supplemental index vs the main index?
Since site:mysite.com *** -sljktf stopped working to find pages in the supplemental index several years ago has anyone found another way to identify content that has been regulated to the supplemental index?
Technical SEO | | SEMPassion0 -
DNS vs IIS redirection
I'm working on a project where a site has gone through a rebrand and is therefore also moving to a new domain name. Some pages have been merged on the new site so it's not a lift and shift job and so I'm writing up a redirect plan. Their IT dept have asked if we want redirects done by DNS redirect or IIS redirect. Which one will allow us to have redirects on a page level and not a domain level? I think IIS may be the right route but would love your thoughts on this please.
Technical SEO | | Marketing_Today1 -
Too many on-page links vs. UX issue
I am having an issue with many of our pages having too many on-page links. I have gotten many of them below the 100 page limit that is suggested and I understand this is not a critical factor with SEO, but my issue is this: Many important pages I am trying to optimize are buried at a "3rd" level which is actually not accessible from the home page navigation dropdown due to our outdated CMS. I am trying to decide if we should develop our site to display these pages on-hover from the main navigation. This would make a lot of sense since users would find these pages easier, however adding this functionality would increase on-page links by a lot more. So in your opinion, would it be worth it to spend the money to have this functionality developed? Or would it end up hurting our SEO standings?
Technical SEO | | isret_efront0 -
How to recover from duplicate subdomain penalty?
Two and half a weeks ago, my site was slapped with a penalty -- 60% of organic traffic disappeared over 2-3 days. After investigating we discovered that our site was serving the same content for all subdomains, and Google somehow had two additional subdomains it was crawling and indexing. We solved the issue with 301 redirects to our main site (www) a couple of days after the drop -- about two weeks ago. Our rankings have not recovered, and the subdomains are still indexed per Webmaster Tools. Yesterday we submitted a Reconsideration Request. Will that help? Is there any other way to speed up the process of lifting the penalty? This is the site: http://goo.gl/3DCbl Thank you!
Technical SEO | | tact0 -
Do knowledge base plugins on a subdomain have seo benefit?
Hi SEO Moz, We want to use a knowledge base plugin (cheaper & faster than building it ourselves) where we can have Q&As for our website. We want this to help with our SEO by adding in our keyterms that we want to rank for. We've looked into TenderApp & Get Satisfaction which look like good solutions - however, as they're both on a sub-domain do we get any seo benefit from this? When people link to our knowledge base, will this help our website at all - or is the benefit going to go to TenderApp/Get Satisfaction? For instance - Our website URL is http://widget.products.com The KB URL is http://widgetsupport.products.com If the above plugin is not a good solution, is there anything else that is better? Any help will be greatly appreciated!! Thanks.
Technical SEO | | qdigi0 -
301s vs. rel=canonical for duplicate content across domains
Howdy mozzers, I just took on a telecommunications client who has spent the last few years acquiring smaller communications companies. When they took over these companies, they simply duplicated their site at all the old domains, resulting in a bunch of sites across the web with the exact same content. Obviously I'd like them all 301'd to their main site, but I'm getting push back. Am I OK to simply plug in rel=canonical tags across the duplicate sites? All the content is literally exactly the same. Thanks as always
Technical SEO | | jamesm5i0