Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Franchise sites: Should each franchise have a subdomain or subdirectory?

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Franchise sites: Should each franchise have a subdomain or subdirectory?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    2
    4
    1490
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • ideasandpixels
      ideasandpixels last edited by

      One of my clients has about 40 franchisees who are going to have their own sites on a WordPress multisite installation. The question they're wondering: should these be on subdirectories (thesite.com/this-franchise) or on subdomains (this-franchise.thesite.com)? Which is best for SEO?

      Thanks!

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • TheeDigital
        TheeDigital last edited by

        As the parent company, I would want any individual work done to benefit the main site and as a store owner, I would want to have some benefit from the parent company as well. There need to be policies in place to prevent bad practices, but it should be all stores and the parent company helping each other. If they want to be treated as a separate entity then they should probably build a website themselves on a separate domain. Most major retailers have the stores in subfolders. Go check walmart.com as an example.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • ideasandpixels
          ideasandpixels @TheeDigital last edited by

          Thanks for the input. What if they want to be treated as separate sites? Do you think they should want to be treated like separate sites? The idea is these are franchises all over the country, so they have vastly different audiences/geolocations.

          For us, we're really on the fence about which route we should take.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • TheeDigital
            TheeDigital last edited by

            Best for SEO is with a subdirectory. Subdomains can be treated as separate websites.

            ideasandpixels 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 3
            • 1 / 1
            • First post
              Last post

            Got a burning SEO question?

            Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


            Start my free trial


            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.

            • See all categories

            Related Questions

            • HellasSITES

              Site Migration - Pagination

              Hi, We are migrating our website and an issue we are facing is how to handle paginated content in our categories. Our new website will have the same structure but with different urls. Should we 301 redirect all the paginated content (if crawled by Google) to the url of the main category? To put this into an example: Old urls: www.example.com/technology/tvs      (main category of TVs & also page 1) ** www.example.com/technology/tvs?v=0&page=2 **    ( page 2 of TVs) New urls: **www.example.com/soundvision/tvs     **(main category of TVs & also page 1) **www.example.com/soundvision/tvs?page=2       **(page 2 of tvs) Should we redirect  all of the old TV urls (also the paginated) to www.example.com/soundvision/tvs ? The is no rel next, prev tag in our site and no canonicals. Also there is a view all products page in each category, BUT it doesn't contain all the products(max. is 100 per page - yes the view all page is also paginated). The same view all products page (paginated) will exist in the new website also. I checked google search console, and Google has decided to treat as canonical page the first page www.example.com/technology/tvs . Also, all the organic traffic of our categories goes to these pages (main category page - 1st page). I would appreciate any thoughts on this.

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HellasSITES
              0
            • Chris8198

              301 Redirecting from domain to subdomain

              We're taking on a redesign of our corporate site on our main domain.  We also have a number of well established, product based subdomains. There are a number of content pages that currently live on the corporate site that rank well, and bring in a great deal of traffic, though we are considering placing 301 redirects in place to point that traffic to the appropriate pages on the subdomains. If redirected correctly, can we expect the SEO value of the content pages currently living on the corporate site to transfer to the subdomains, or will we be negatively impacting our SEO by transferring this content from one domain to multiple subdomains?

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris8198
              0
            • kinimod

              Microsites: Subdomain vs own domains

              I am working on a travel site about a specific region, which includes information about lots of different topics, such as weddings, surfing etc. I was wondering whether its a good idea to register domains for each topic since it would enable me to build backlinks. I would basically keep the design more or less the same and implement a nofollow navigation bar to each microsite. e.g.
              weddingsbarcelona.com
              surfingbarcelona.com or should I rather go with one domain and subfolders: barcelona.com/weddings
              barcelona.com/surfing I guess the second option is how I would usually do it but I just wanted to see what are the pros/cons of both options. Many thanks!

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kinimod
              0
            • Blink-SEO

              Turning off a subdomain

              Hi! I'm currently working with http://www.muchbetteradventures.com/. They have a previous version of the site, http://v1.muchbetteradventures.com, as sub domain on their site. I've noticed a whole bunch of indexing issues which I think are caused by this. The v1 site has several thousand pages and ranks organically for a number of terms, but the pages are not relevant for the business at this time. The main site has just over 100 pages. More than 28,400 urls are currently indexed. We are considering turning off the v1 site and noindexing it. There are no real backlinks to it. The only worry is that by removing it, it will be seen as a massive drop in content. Rankings for the main site are currently quite poor, despite good content, a decent link profile and high domain authority. Any thoughts would be much appreciated!

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO
              0
            • optimalwebinc

              Why does a site have no domain authority?

              A website was built and launched eight months ago, and their domain authority is 1.  When a site has been live for a while and has such a low DA, what's causing it?

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | optimalwebinc
              0
            • DerekM88

              Partner Login as subdomain?

              Hi MozTeam, We have a website that is used as our partner login for our Partners to see their stats, but it is located on a SEPARATE domain from our main corporate website. We currently have thousands of people logging into the external portal every month, which we are obviously not getting good SEO credit for. I am considering bringing the entire login portal into our main corporate website, so that Google sees how popular and useful our site becomes when thousands more people are visiting... We only get a few thousands organic visits to the corporate site per month and about 3x that to the partner login portal. This is why I originally thought we could benefit from bringing it into our corporate site. Challaneges: our website is in .asp but we are launching a new version of it next month, switching it to Wordpress and into .php....but the current partner login website is still in .asp! Questions: 1. How will bringing this site into the main corporate site benefit us as far as SEO? 2. What is the proper way to combine an .asp site with a .php site? 3. If we have to use an iFrame because we can't mix the two languages, will that affect our SEO benefit? Pls advise, as if this is actually a good idea, I'd like to get it launched along with the site redesign that is currently under way.

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DerekM88
              0
            • HaCos

              Use of subdomains, subdirectories or both?

              Hello, i would like your advice on a dilemma i am facing. I am working a new project that is going to release soon,  thats a network of users with personal profiles seperated in categories for example lets say the categories are colors. So let say i am a member and i belong in red color categorie and i got a page where i update my personal information/cv/resume as well as a personal blog thats on that page. So the main site is giving the option to user to search for members by the criteria of color. My first idea is that all users should own a subdomain (and this is how its developed so far) thats easy to use and since the domain name is really small (just 3 letters) i believe subdomain worth since personal site will be easy to remember. My dilemma is should all users own a subdomain, a subdirectory or both and if both witch one should be the canonical? Since it said that search engines treat subdomains as different stand-alone sites, whats best for the main site? to show multiple search results with profiles in subdomains or subdirectories? What if i use both? meaning in search results i use search directory url for each profile while same time each profile owns a subdomains as well? and if so which one should be the canonical? Thanks in advance, C

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HaCos
              0
            • adresanet

              Backlinks from Chinese Big sites

              Hello, I wish I know your position regarding backlinks from chinese websites. I am able to get a text link(from homepage) from a very big site in chinese. It has PR8 and over 10M users monthly. My site is in english. Will it help me ? Will I be penalised (my site is 5 years old, PR4) and some decent traffic(6-7k daily) Thanks!

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adresanet
              0

            Get started with Moz Pro!

            Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

            Start my free trial
            Products
            • Moz Pro
            • Moz Local
            • Moz API
            • Moz Data
            • STAT
            • Product Updates
            Moz Solutions
            • SMB Solutions
            • Agency Solutions
            • Enterprise Solutions
            • Digital Marketers
            Free SEO Tools
            • Domain Authority Checker
            • Link Explorer
            • Keyword Explorer
            • Competitive Research
            • Brand Authority Checker
            • Local Citation Checker
            • MozBar Extension
            • MozCast
            Resources
            • Blog
            • SEO Learning Center
            • Help Hub
            • Beginner's Guide to SEO
            • How-to Guides
            • Moz Academy
            • API Docs
            About Moz
            • About
            • Team
            • Careers
            • Contact
            Why Moz
            • Case Studies
            • Testimonials
            Get Involved
            • Become an Affiliate
            • MozCon
            • Webinars
            • Practical Marketer Series
            • MozPod
            Connect with us

            Contact the Help team

            Join our newsletter
            Moz logo
            © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
            • Accessibility
            • Terms of Use
            • Privacy

            Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.