Subdomains vs. Subfolders for unique categories & topics
-
Hello,
We are in the process of redesigning and migrating 5 previously separate websites (all different niche topics, including dining, entertainment, retail, real estate, etc.) under one umbrella site for the property in which they exist. From the property homepage, you will now be able to access all of the individual category sites within.
As each niche microsite will be focused on a different topic, I am wondering whether it is best for SEO that we use subdomains such as category.mainsite.com or subfolders mainsite.com/category.
I have seen it done both ways on large corporate sites (ie: Ikea uses subdomains for different country sites, and Apple uses subfolders), so I am wondering what makes the most sense for this particular umbrella site.
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Thanks, Melissa
-
Its a no questions asked answer- SUBFOLDERS- by creating subdomains it's like saying your a separate entity and by doing that you will not be sharing all the value from the main domain and all the domains combined ie. pagerank, pages indexed, links, etc.
-
Yeah, I'm a subfolders kind of guy too, but here's SEOmoz weighing in on the subject of microsites and talking about the same sort of question you are - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites
-
Definitely use subfolders!
By using your subfolders you pass all link juice and PR to the main domain which is mainsite.com. If you have say 10 subdomains, you are splitting the authority/link-juice/PR.
I know there are others who say Google passes the juice between a domain and subdomain, and it does pass some, but not all.
You cannot go wrong using subfolders. You build up one main domain, it's clean, user-friendly, etc...
SUBFOLDERS!
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
-
When do you use article markup for AMP pages?
Hi all! For a healthcare website we have setup AMP. Google Search Console suggests to use article markup for several pages and I am not sure if this is correct. There are two kind of pages:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DeptAgency
1. News pages
2. Information pages, for example: symptoms alcohol addiction or Binge Eating Disorder There's no doubt the article markup will be correct for the news pages but I am not sure about the information pages. Do you guys suggest to implement article markup on these pages as well or only use this for real news/blog posts? Hope you can help me out. Thank you in advance and happy holidays! Regards, Anouk van de Velde0 -
The Great Subdomain vs. Subfolder Debate, what is the best answer?
Recently one of my clients was hesitant to move their new store locator pages to a subdomain. They have some SEO knowledge and cited the whiteboard Friday article at https://moz.com/blog/subdomains-vs-subfolders-rel-canonical-vs-301-how-to-structure-links-optimally-for-seo-whiteboard-friday. While it is very possible that Rand Fiskin has a valid point I felt hesitant to let this be the final verdict. John Mueller from Google Webmaster Central claims that Google is indifferent towards subdomains vs subfolders. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h1t5fs5VcI#t=50 Also this SEO disagreed with Rand Fiskin’s post about using sub folders instead of sub domains. He claims that Rand Fiskin ran only 3 experiments over 2 years, while he has tested multiple subdomain vs subfolder experiments over 10 years and observed no difference. http://www.seo-theory.com/2015/02/06/subdomains-vs-subfolders-what-are-the-facts-on-rankings/ Here is another post from the Website Magazine. They too believe that there is no SEO benefits of a subdomain vs subfolder infrastructure. Proper SEO and infrastructure is what is most important. http://www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/archive/2015/03/10/seo-inquiry-subdomains-subdirectories.aspx Again Rand might be right, but I rather provide a recommendation to my client based on an authoritative source such as a Google engineer like John Mueller. Does anybody else have any thoughts and/or insight about this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB3 -
Title Length Vs Keywords
Hello all, I've been talking with an SEO expert who convinced me to add more keywords to my titles of a section of our site which is updated with products daily. I can see the logic and I do prefer having these additional keywords. The problem now is in Moz it says we have over 2,000 pages with title elements that are too long, which is true they are all over the 70 character limit. Is this a problem SEO wise? Speaking to our SEO expert they said it's not ideal from a user point of view as you can't see the full title, but are we going to be upsetting Google by having 150+ character titles? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HB171 -
Subdomains vs. Subfolders vs. New Site
Hello geniuses!!! Here's my Friday puzzle: We have a plastic surgery client who already has a website that's performing fairly well and is driving in leads. She is going to be offering a highly specialized skincare program for cancer patients, and wants a new logo, new website and new promo materials all for this new skincare program. So here's the thing - my gut reaction says NO NEW WEBSITE! NO SUBDOMAIN! because of everything I've read about moving things on and off subdomains, etc (I just studied this: http://moz.com/blog/subdomains-vs-subfolders-rel-canonical-vs-301-how-to-structure-links-optimally-for-seo-whiteboard-friday). And, why wouldn't we want to use the authority of her current site, right? While she doesn't necessarily have a high authority domain - we're not talking WebMD, here - she does have some authority that we've built over time. But, because this is a pretty separate product from her general plastic surgery practice, what would you guys do? Since we'll be creating a logo and skincare "look and feel" for this product, and there will likely be a lot of information involved with it, I don't think we'll be able to just create one page. Is it smart to: a) build a separate site in a subfolder of her current site? (plasticsurgerypractice.com/skincare) b) build a subdomain? (skincare.plasticsurgerypractice.com) c) build her a new site (plasticsurgeryskincare.com)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RachelEm0 -
Meta Abstract & Revisit
Moz Community, I have just noted a competitor using some meta information i have not seen before, Just wondering if anyone has any experience or feedback on using these tags and if they are worth implementing, Seems very similar to the meta description, i don't really see the point unless potentially this abstract could be more topic based if your meta description is designed for Click-Through optimization. Isn't this defined in the sitemap anyway? , and most of the time we will Tweet and Google Plus share any new updates to our site also Google seems to do a good job anyway of crawling anything new we publish or change, Any advice or feedback would be great please, Thanks James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Antony_Towle0 -
Moving popular blog from root to subdomain. Considerations & impact?
I'd like to move the popular company blog from /ecommerce-blog to blog.bigcommerce.com.WordPress application is currently living inside the application that runs the .com and is adding a large amount of files to the parent app, which results in longer deployment times than we'd like. We would use HTTP redirection to handle future requests (e.g. HTTP status code 301). How can this be handled from a WP point of view? What is the impact of SEO, rankings, links, authority? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fullstackmarketing.io0 -
Duplicate (Basically) H1 & H2
We've about to relaunch one of our ecommerce sites and have a question regarding H1 & H2 tags. We use our primary keyword for each category in that category page's H1. We also include a block of text at the bottom of the page explaining the benefits of the products, the various styles we offer, personalization options, gift packaging, etc. We were planning on having an H2 at the beginning of that text that read 'About [keyword:]', but the question of duplicate H1 & H2 tags has come up. Is penalization possible for having them almost the same? It's not like they're not relevant - the H1 is referring to the category itself and the H2 references our explanation of the category. Just curious what the best way to approach this would be.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingof50 -
Multiple stores & domains vs. One unified store (SEO pros / cons for E-Commerce)
Our company runs a number of individual online shops, specialised in particular products but all in the same genre of goods overall, with a specific and relevant domain name for each shop. At the moment the sites are separate, and not interlinked, i.e. Completely separate brands. An analogy could be something like clothing accessories (we are not in the clothing business): scarves.com, and silkties.com (our field is more niche than this) We are about to launch a related site, (e.g. handbags.com), in the same field again but without precisely overlapping products. We will produce this site on a newer, more flexible e-commerce platform, so now is a good time to consider whether we want to place all our sites together with one e-commerce system on the backend. Essentially, we need to know what the pros and cons would be of the various options facing us and how the SEO ranking is affected by the three possibilities. Option 1: continue with separate sites each with its own domains. Option 2: have multiple sites, each on their own domain, but on the same ecommerce system and visible linked together for the customer (with unified checkout) – on the top of each site could be a menu bar linking to each site: [Scarves.com] – [SilkTies.com] – [Handbags.com] The main question here is whether the multiple domains are mutually beneficial, particularly considerding how close to target keywords the individual domains are. If mutually benefitial, how does it compare to option 3: Option 3: Having recently acquired a domain name (e.g. accessories.com) which would cover the whole category together, we are presented with a third option: making one site selling all of these products in different categories. Our main concern here would be losing the ability to specifically target marketing, and losing the benefit of the domains with the key words in for what people are more likely to be searching for (e.g. 'silk tie') rather than 'accessories.' Is it worth taking the hit on losing these specific targeted domain names for the advantage of increased combined inbound links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Colage0