Subdomain v. subdirectory v. other domain for blogs
-
I have a good amount of content on our main domain ( http://m00.biz/w4Ljfr ) let's say for discussion it's doctors.com and as you can see, much of it is in subdirectories. Traditionally this was the approach. Now I have some other content on subdomains but it's primarily directories and databases.
Now I see that Google is giving subdomains their own SER as if they are a separate site and competitors are locking in the top few results merely by having their content on subdomains. Now I have an opportunity of doing two things:
1. Current content: moving all the content of the past few years on their own subdomain (forum, blog), and I'll be moving forum software anyways. Not sure about our own guide, which has been up there for a while.
2. New content: putting up some new blogs/magazines such as "Doctor's Handbook." Let's say that is a common phrase. I can choose between the following:
I've got a bit of a quandary here, not sure of the best course of action and am curious to hear from many of you who have handled situations like this before.
-
I am not going to tell you what I "would do"... I am going to tell you what I "have done".
Within the past year I have redirected all subdomains into folders in the root directory of the main site. Most thin content was thrown overboard, some thin content is being improved, the rest of the thin content is temporary and has been noindex, followed.
-
Thanks for sharing your thoughts guys. EGOL - the branding aspect is a good point for the domain v. other domain issue. But I'm still troubled by the subdomain v. subdirectory setup.
Dan - The user experience of subdomain v. subdirectory is not relevant with a good dropdown menu. I don't know that they will type in "guide" to get there or "journal" either, except after becoming very familiar with the site. They'd know the subdomain anyways. The problem is I've moved to mixture of both. Google allegedly penalized us for having 'thin" content in a lawye r directory that was "thin" and supposedly more acceptable on the subdomain, which is a whole other site - at least to Google. To me, this is a paradox. The form over substance treatment is ridiculous and leads to ridiculous results (like one dominant site appearing 3-5 times at the top of page 1 as if each subdomain is a separate site.) Now I'm being told that Google is reacting to this but I'm still not sure what this means. Will I be creating problems by serving up my content on subdomains (which also saves three characters of www and creates shorter urls)?
Bottom line - if you guys were resetting up the site and given Panda's killing "thinner" content such as storefronts and directories:
(a) would you stick with all subdirectories (or all subdomains) or use a combo of the two?
(b) If you'd use only one, which one would you use? I've got the site URL up there but, in short, the primary content is on the subdirectories.
(c) If you continue the subdirectory setup, how do I avoid getting killed by Panda solely because some content isn't as "thick" as others inherently, e.g. a storefront with products? Google doesn't seem to care much about noindex tags on my site for "thin" content.
-
Hi
I'd also look at this from the user's point of view. In my personal experience the first option (a subfolder) is the least confusing.
-Dan
-
If your main site is already dominating the SERPs for every keyword that your blog will cover it might make sense to put this content on a subdomain or a secondary site..
However, if your main site is not killing the SERPs and the content that you will be publishing is worthy of links, tweets, likes, and other forms of sharing then I would place it in a folder on the primary domain. You want to focus this attention on the primary domain because this attention is what drives rankings.
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
-
Sub-domain or not???
Hi, We're setting up a forum for our users (our target audience responds extremely well to forums). I was wondering if it should be set up on a sub-domain or not. I'm leaning towards sub-domain, but our devs say this will impact how they approach it so I'd like to give them an answer asap so we can proceed with planning it! Thanks, Amelia
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommT0 -
Domain.com/old-url to domain.com/new-url
HI, I have to change old url`s to new one, for the same domain and all landing pages will be the same: domain.com/old-url I have to change to: domain.com/new-url All together more than 70.000 url. What is best way to do that? should I use 301st redirect? is it possible to do in code or how? what could you please suggest? Thank you, Edgars
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Edzjus3330 -
Implications of posting duplicate blog content on external domains?
I've had a few questions around the blog content on our site. Some of our vendors and partners have expressed interest in posting some of that content on their domains. What are the implications if we were to post copies of our blog posts on other domains? Should this be avoided or are there circumstances that this type of program would make sense?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Visier1 -
Should I redirect all my subdomains to a single unique subdomain to eliminate duplicate content?
Hi there! I've been working on http://duproprio.com for a couple of years now. In the early stages of the website, we've put into place a subdomain wildcard, that allowed us to create urls like this on the fly : http://{some-city}.duproprio.com This brought us instantly a lot of success in terms of traffic due to the cities being great search keywords. But now, business has grown, and as we all know, duplicate content is the devil so I've been playing with the idea of killing (redirecting) all those urls to their equivalent on the root domain. http://some-city.duproprio.com/some-listing-1234 would redirect to equivalent page at : http://duproprio.com/some-listing-1234 Even if my redirections are 301 permanent, there will be some juice lost for each link redirected that are actually pointing to my old subdomains This would also imply to redirect http://www.duproprio.com to http://duproprio.com. Which is probably the part I'm most anxious about since the incoming links are almost 50/50 between those 2 subdomains... Bringing everything back into a single subdomain is the thing to do in order to get all my seo juice together, this part is obvious... But what can I do to make sure that I don't end up actually losing traffic instead of gaining authority? Can you help me get the confidence I need to make this "move" without risking to lose tons of traffic? Thanks a big lot!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DuProprio.com0 -
Domain Favoured by Google
Hi there, We have just launched our website in Ireland .ie and was wondering would the .ie website be favoured by Google over a competitor with a .co.uk or .com domain? Kind Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Redirect on exact match domain to Brand domain question :)
Hi, If I have a website with the domain crazysocks.co.uk and a title tag 'black socks' would I see any benefit redirecting blacksocks.co.uk to crazysocks.co.uk, to give my keyword 'black socks' a boost in the SE's from the EMD. I see it loads where an EMD is indexed for its term but when you click the result it redirects to a branded domain. I personally cant see this being true but wanted to double check.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0 -
Move blog from subdomain to main domain on ecom site?
I am wondering what my fellow mozers think. Pretty set about my direction but want to get any other input to aid in my decision. Have an ecom site with a www.blog.maindomain.com. The blog is fairly new and no major rankings. There are only about 30 posts. This isn't a super competitive market and the blogging won't be a huge part of our content strategy but I would like to use it for passing juice etc. Would you go through the trouble to move the blog to www.site.com/blog and redirecting all the old content to new?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PEnterprises0 -
How to get subdomains to rank well?
Hi All, I am setting up a new site and I want to make use of subdomains to target multiple countries as follows: uk.mydomain.com us.mydomain.com australia.mydomain.com etc. Now i know what you're all going to say, why not use folders as they are more effective. Well I did think of this but decided against it because I would like to make the best of a low competition industry. I want to push my competitors as far down in the SE's as possible and i plan to do this by targeting generic non locational search terms with both sites so I can hog the top 4 spots.as follows: www.mydomain.com www.mydomain.com/keyterm uk.mydomain.com uk.mydomain.com/keyterm-in-the-UK Whats steps can I take to ensure rank passes to my subdomains? Is it better to start the site with folders like www.mydomain.com/us/keyterm and then 301 them to subdomains at a later stage or should i start with the subdomains?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mulith1