Subdomain blog vs. subfolder blog in 2013
-
So I've read the posts here:
http://moz.com/community/q/subdomain-blog-vs-subfolder-blog-in-2013
and many others, Matt Cutts video, etc.
Does anyone have direct experience that its still best practice to use the sub folder? (hopefully a moz employee can chime in?)
I have a client looking to use hubspot. They are preaching with the Matt Cutts video. I'm in charge of SEO / marketing and am at odds with them now. I'd like to present the client with more info than "in my experience in the past I've seen subdirectories work."
Any help? Articles? etc?
-
I'm associated with a site that ranked fairly well. Earlier in the summer, the blog was moved from a subfolder to a subdomain for various reasons. While the reasons seemed valid at the time, the site's traffic plummeted about 1-2 weeks later. We've still been trying to analyze as many other changes were made a few weeks prior; however, the arrows are pointing to the subfolder to subdomain change which may have really caused this plague. We're now looking into moving it back to see if it will resolve the problem.
-
This does not influence my opinion about anything.
-
Google does not calculate DA
-
I have first-hand experience that merging a subdomain into a folder on a domain can have a kickass effect on your rankings.
-
-
I just tested:
and hubspot.com
both have the same DA in OSE.
I also tested support.hostgator.com and hostgator.com
those have the same DA.
-
If you got Jesse and PhD sayin' something, best go with it.
-
Well yes. I mean it's quite simple - Linking to a subdomain does not pass authority to the root domain. It's easy to test on any site you can find me that has a subdomain. Plug it into OSE and you have yourself two different DAs for that very reason.
It's something I don't see ever changing. There's a reason sub domains are treated separately in terms of incoming links; they are their own entity and I believe this will always be the case. Can't think of why it wouldn't.
-
Thanks guys. I know everyone in our industry is pro sub directories. I guess what I am looking for is irrefutable case studies / fact. Have you guys tested this post 2012? Is there any evidence from 2013 that this is still the case?
-
I second that. You use the blog to build the authority of the main domain.
-
Using a subdirectory will cause all of the potential link juice to flow to your root domain. If you go with a subdomain, the potential links gained from awesome blog content won't do your actual domain any good as far as ranking organically for your targeted keywords.
That's the short version. Subdirectories all the way (assuming this is what you're gaming at of course.)
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
-
Frequent Blog Content-Effective in Improving Ranking?
To what extent will posting quality blog posts 2 to 3 times per week have the following effects: 1. Improve ranking for specific keywords?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
2. Create backlinks to our website
3. Increase MOZ domain authority
4. Increase organic search traffic Assume that the blog posts are geared towards answering user inquiries and are also posted on our social media accounts. Would such an approach be better than engaging in a link building campaign, in the sense that the links will be created organically by users that want to link to our site? Thanks,
Alan0 -
Changing URL to a subdomain?
Hi there, I had a website www.footballshirtcollective.com that has been live since July. It contains both content and eCommerce. I am now separating out the content so that; 1. The master domain is www.footballshirtcollective.com (content) pointing to a new site 2. Subdomain is store.footballshirtcollective.com (ecommerce) - pointing to the existing site. What do you advise I can do to minimise the impact on my search? Many thanks Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mjmaxwell0 -
DA vs Relevancy - Trade Off Question
Hey Guys We all know that relevancy largely trumps DA nowadays. What I am wondering is if there is a DA 'level' at which relevancy doesn't really matter - you probably still want a backlink from that site... For example, sites with DA of 100 we probably want backlinks from. So where do you draw the line? What I mean is for a high DA 'non relevant' site, what DA is 'acceptable' where you start to disregard relevancy? I'm thinking something like 70 and above would like some other thoughts... Obviously you would still be building relevant links too, developing content to do so and all that good stuff. I am just wondering what DA I should focus on for building non-relevant links ALONGSIDE relevant links 🙂 Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GTAMP0 -
What is better for web ranking? A domain or subdomain?
I realise that often it is better put content in a subfolder rather than a subdomain, but I have another question that I cannot seem to find the answer to. Is there any ranking benefit to having a site on a .co.uk or .com domain rather than on a subdomain? I'm guessing that the subdomain might benefit from other content on the domain it's hosted on, but are subdomains weighted down in any way in the search results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Google Cookies - Organic vs PPC visitors
I am not a developer - I am researching this for our team, so please, be gentle... I am also not quite sure how to ask this question. We want to serve up custom pages for visitors from Google organic. We aren't doing anything underhanded - the pages will have very small differences that will not affect our rankings and won't land us in Google jail. When a Google visitor hits one of our pages, what specific piece of data are we looking for to determine: a. It's a Google visitor b. He/she came from organic results. I need to tell our developers to look for something that triggers the custom page. It's the same data that Google Analytics uses to trigger the appropriate visitor type. Please pardon my naivete.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
Canonical Vs No Follow for Duplicate Products
I am in the process of migrating a site from Volusion to BigCommerce. There is a limitation on the ability to display one product in 2 different ways. Here is the situation. One of the manufacturers will not allow us to display products to customers who are not logged in. We have convinced them to let us display the products with no prices. Then we created an Exclusive Contractor section that will allow users to see the price and be able to purchase the products online. Originally we were going to just direct users to call to make purchases like our competitors are doing. Because we have a large amount of purchasers online we wanted to manipulate the system to be able to allow online purchases. Since these products will have duplicates with no pricing I was thinking that Canonical tags would be kind of best practice. However, everything will be behind a firewall with a message directing people to log in. Since this will undoubtedly create a high bounce rate I feel like I need to no follow those links. This is a rather large site, over 5000 pages. The 250 no follow URLs most likely won't have a large impact on the overall performance of the site. Or so I hope anyway. My gut tells me if these products are going to technically be hidden from the searcher they should also be hidden from the engines. Does Disallowing these URLs seem like a better way to do this than simply using the Canonical tags? Any thoughts or suggestions would be really helpful!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MonicaOConnor0 -
Blog Integration
I have a blog and website, .. I have it under the same domain but it has its own login and dashboard ect..I would like to fully integrate it to my website so it becomes a part of my main navigation... If anyone know's how to do this or even has an idea on where to start it is greatly appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JimDirectMailCoach0 -
Should we stream videos from a subdomain or subfolder?
This is causing some hand-wrangling and I need some help. Let's say we were developing rich video content for our products and our agency is hosting the content on a new external server. There are already plans to link to these videos from product detail pages, category pages, and landing pages on our main website: www.example.com. Would it be better to create a new subdomain or to use a subfolder with a reverse proxy technique for this video content? It's not truly a microsite and will not have a gallery page to navigate the various videos. For example, would it be better to use this: video.example.com/ ...or this (executed with a reverse proxy😞 www.example.com/video/ Of course, regardless of whether this new content will live on a subdomain or within a subfolder, we plan on creating a video Sitemap using guidance from Justin Hammack in this terrific post.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ryan-Ricketts1