Subdirectory vs. Subdomain
-
I work for a large franchise organization that is weighing the pros and cons of using subdomains versus subdirectories for our franchisee locations. What are the pros and cons of each approach?
-
As far as the post-panda world goes, I found this post to be helpful for both beginner and advanced SEOs alike: http://www.whitefireseo.com/site-architecture/subdomain-or-subfolder-post-panda/360/
-
Sure - I dont like giving out my own clients here, but a quick search for say, Seattle Hotels, a very competitive niche, shows the following:
#3 just under tripadvisor and expedia: http://www.starwoodhotels.com/whotels/property/overview/index.html?propertyID=1154
#4 (and #1 in map pack): http://www.fairmont.com/seattle/
These hotels may or may not be franchises, but the business model makes no difference to Google. The important thing is that these two sites are both ranking in various cities for " <city>hotels". Each uses a slightly different technique (starwood using a subfolder that uses dynamic property ID urls, and fairmont that simply uses a subfolder.</city>
-
Jared,
Can you give me examples of franchises you know that rank well using this method?
thanks!
LP
-
Nakul,
Thank you for your reply!
Answer to your questions:
-
Franchisees could request changes through corporate that would have to be approved and implemented by corporate website manager.
-
It would be difficult to create and manage content for 250+ locations and not have duplicate content. I believe we will have a significant amount of duplicate content except for city name.
-
We would like main site to rank well for non geo specific search "product" and franchise content to rank well for geo specific search "product dallas"
I would appreciate your response based on these clarifications!
thanks!
-
-
Great points here by both Matt and Nakul. Of particular importance is understanding who will have access to edit, and site duplication. If you want each of your franchise owners to have editing capabilities for the own store, then it may be easier to use subdomains from a permissions perspective.
As for duplicate content, you'll need to worry about that regardless of whether you use a sub or a folder.
As a case study, Ive worked two very large projects like this, and in both cases I used subfolders for the locations. The folders were the city name in both cases. Each location is positioned position 1 or 2 across the board, and each location shows well in the map packs.
-
For a franchise scenario, it would be best to use a sub-domain, however it does depend on other things as well.
1. Would franchises be able to control / add / edit any content on these sites ?
2. Any duplicate content issues between multiple sites ?
3. Do all of them need to be indexed in the search engines and getting/targetting search traffic ?As a general rule, for SEO, sub-folders are much better, but in your scenario, it's a different case.
You might also want to refer to other similar questions here on SEOMOZ.
- http://www.seomoz.org/q/blogs-are-best-when-hosted-on-domain-subdomain-or
- http://www.seomoz.org/q/setting-up-a-company-blog-subdomain-or-new-url
- http://www.seomoz.org/q/blog-vs-blog
and the post from Matt Cutts
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/
-
As far as I understand, subdomains are good when you want each subdomain judged on its own merit. For instance, Wordpress uses me.wordpress.com and you.wordpress.com That means my site may not bring everyone down if I get penalized. However, if you had wordpress.com/me and wordpress.com/you, we're on the same domain so you'd find it harder to improve your own SEO while I am bringing you down.
So if you're trying to separate content, use subdomains. If it's all one company/organization and you are confident all franchisees will do the right thing, use subfolders. If you wanted say
The SEO work would be 2x (or 50x if you had 50 franchises) but it would stand alone. That means if the Boston Franchise did a lot of work, they'd be much better off than the ATL one who did less. If the main franchise.com is doing all the seo for everyone, you'll want to use subfolders.
At least that's my understanding of the difference!
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
-
New Subdomain SEO questions
I have a main site - mysite.com. I just created a subdomain - leadform.mysite.com I plan to use the leadform.mysite.com as a 1 page lead form only. I will link to leadform.mysite.com from mysite.com and also from other websites I own (myothersite.com etc.) - filtering all traffic to this form to capture leads. (Note - the leadform.mysite.com has CNAME to other server that hosts the backend of the form) My questions are: How should I link from mysite.com to leadform.mysite.com? With dofollow or nofollow? (mysite.com has 1000's of pages and would link from every page with "get a quote' type button) 2) How should I link from myothersite.com to leadform.mysite.com? With dofollow or nofollow? Any SEO risk linking to leadform.mysite.com from an outside domain? (myothersite.com has 1000's of pages and would link from every page with "get a quote' type button) Does it make sense to build links from outside sites to leadform.mysite.com directly to try to get that lead capture page to rank on it's own? 4) Does it make sense to link back from leadform.mysite.com back to mysite.com for seo value? With dofollow or nofollow? Thanks in advance for any help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | leadforms0 -
Domain.com/postname vs. Domain.com/blog/postname
I am wondering what is the best practice regarding blogs? I read that it would be best to structure a website like a pyramide instead of a flat panckage But I have seen many blogs where the post shows right after the domain name. Domain.com/postname instead of Domains/blog/postname My point is that if a website has many post then the structure will get very flat and this will maybe make your most optimized and important pages less important to google domain.com/page a) What do you think about this, which one of the two blog solutions do you prefer and why? b) in context to blog If for instance you had a keyword like Copenhagen property would you then consider renaming your blog to realetateagent.com/Copenhagen-property-news/post-name c) Would write a little intro like 200 words for the page 1 of your blog and add in some keywords.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nm19770 -
Subdomains and Forwarding Domains
Will someone who has experience chime in on these two issues below: Do sub-domain links which link back to the main site count as a new link from a new site; or would they be considered more of an internal link? Basically, would a sub-domain link to the main site be like a link from a unique website, or treated like any other internal link on the main site? I am speaking in terms of link juice. Should we 301 sub-domains to the main site internally? Thank you, we really appreciate any input you have!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DJ1230 -
SEO: Subdomain vs folders
Hello, here's our situation:We have an ecommerce website, say www.example.com. For support, we use zendesk which offers a great platform that makes publishing FAQ and various resource articles very easy. We're torn between publishing these articles on our actual website, or publishing them via Zendesk. If we publish them on our website, the url would be something like:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yacpro13
www.example.com/articles/title_article.html On the other hand, if we publish them via zendesk, the url would look like:
support.example.com/articles/title_of_article We would like to publish them via Zendesk, however, we do no want to miss out on any SEO benefit, however marginal it may be. Doing it this way, the domain would have all of the ecommerce pages (product and category pages), and the subdomain would have ALL other types of pages (help articles and also policies, such as return policies, shipping info, etc etc). I know a long time ago, folders were preferred over subdomains for SEO, but things change all the time.Do you think setting up all the ecommerce pages on the domain, and all content pages on the subdomain, would be a lesser solution? Thanks.0 -
Subdomain blog vs. subfolder blog in 2013.
Having read this ( http://www.seomoz.org/q/blog-on-a-subdomain-vs-subfolder ) & countless of blog posts on never to put your blog on a domain because a subdomain is treated as a different site & your blog traffic won't help with your main sites authority. I've always pushed for subfolder blogs. However I've been seeing a lot of blogs now and days saying that Google is now treating subdomains as the same site as your main site. http://www.brafton.com/news/subdomains-vs-subdirectories-for-seo-no-serp-benefits-for-subdomains-anymore http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/34173/subdomains-vs-subdirectory-status-as-of-2012/34366#34366 ETC... What does everyone think? Is it acceptable to have a blog in a subdomain in 2013? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DCochrane0 -
What are the best way to get a new subdomain ranked properly
Our main site (blog with 700 high quality articles) ranks pretty well and we recently launced a rapidly growing forum (55.000 posts in the first 11 weeks) on a subdomain. What would be a good strategy for ranking the forum quickly
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | xpd1 -
SEO value of Articles, Magento vs. Wordpress?
Our e-commerce site is running on the Magento platform while the blog for the site is integrated and is on the Wordpress platform. The blog is not on a separate subdomain, so it is on www.website.con/blog. What I wonder is how Google treats information on a Wordpress blog compared to pages created in the Magento CMS pages. Would a high quality content article posted as a blog post on the Wordpress have a lower SEO value than a page on the Magento? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ikomorin0 -
Robots.txt & url removal vs. noindex, follow?
When de-indexing pages from google, what are the pros & cons of each of the below two options: robots.txt & requesting url removal from google webmasters Use the noindex, follow meta tag on all doctor profile pages Keep the URLs in the Sitemap file so that Google will recrawl them and find the noindex meta tag make sure that they're not disallowed by the robots.txt file
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0