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.
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.
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?
-
I think Mueller's main point may be that if you treat your subdomains separately from your main site, Google will treat them differently as well. For example, if you have three subdomains - www, blog and cloud - but all of them have different navigation, css and limited interlinking and little keyword theme commonality, Google will treat them as separate sites and you will suffer the dreaded subdomain issue.
BUT if you integrate the three domains well - same nav, same look & feel and lots of good contextual anchor text interlinking, Google will treat it as the same site and the subdomain issue will become moot.
Has anyone done any testing with those variables?
-
Yup! All the case studies I showed above (and plenty since) have demonstrated that you can boost traffic by moving from the subdomain to a subfolder.
-
Great thread! What about a situation where a blog already sits on a subdomain (bearing in mind it hasn't been driving a significant amount of traffic as the site is fairly new). My recommendation would be to move to subfolder, would you agree?
Thank you!
-
This is my new favorite quote... "I understand that Google's representatives have the authority of working at Google going for them, but I also believe they're wrong." (Rand Fishkin)
-
Greetings All,
So the debate goes on and I personally think the value of subfolders versus directories certainly makes sense especially from a linking, age and juice perspective. I do notice in most articles they talk about the benefits for subfolders as it relates to blogs. In past tests and studies, you have shed any insight into how this may affect ecommerce as it relates to countries.
We currently have each country on a subdomain and can run it through webmaster tools and geotarget the country however are considering switching to subfolders, based on all the articles we've read. This would in such drive many more links back to each new subfolder assuming the majority of our links are from "www". It would seem to make sense to switch to subfolders and would be especially helpful as new sub-folders were launched.
I was just wondering if the same argument can be made when it comes to ecommerce and country specific sites. Each site (currently different subdomains) uses a different language and currency. Meta and content is different for each. We launched "www" over 15 years ago but in the past 2 years have introduced various subdomains (ie new languages). As we enter into new countries, we are considering switching everything over to subfolders (obviously with 301'ing the subdomains over to the new subfolders so we dont lose all our existing links).
Im assuming since your studies indicate, you'd think this to be a good idea however all the talk has not been so much about countries and ecommerce. Any one have any light or information they can share with regards to the topic??
Thnkxs
-
Hi Rosemary - thankfully, I have data, not just opinions to back up my arguments:
- In 2014, Moz moved our Beginner's Guide to SEO from guides.moz.com to moz.com itself. Rankings rose immediately, with no other changes. We ranked higher not only for "seo guide" (outranking Google themselves) but also for "beginners guide" a very broad phrase.
- Check out https://iwantmyname.com/blog/2015/01/seo-penalties-of-moving-our-blog-to-a-subdomain.html - goes into very clear detail about how what Google says about subdomains doesn't match up with realities
- Check out some additional great comments in this thread, including a number from site owners who moved away from subdomains and saw ranking benefits, or who moved to them and saw ranking losses: https://inbound.org/discuss/it-s-2014-what-s-the-latest-thinking-on-sub-domains-vs-sub-directories
- There's another good thread (with some more examples) here: https://inbound.org/blog/the-sub-domain-vs-sub-directory-seo-debate-explained-in-one-flow-chart
Ultimately, it's up to you. I understand that Google's representatives have the authority of working at Google going for them, but I also believe they're wrong. It could be that there's no specific element that penalized subdomains and maybe they're viewed the same in Google's thinking, but there are real ways in which subdomains inherit authority that stay unique to those subdomains and it IS NOT passed between multiple subdomains evenly or equally. I have no horse in this race other than to want to help you and other site owners from struggling against rankings losses - and we've just seen too many when moving to a subdomain and too many gains moving to a subfolder not to be wary.
-
Hi,
I've not seen any comment from Googlers regarding this debate. I realize I'm keeping this in the Moz-sphere, which isn't quite what you're looking for, but this quote is from Moz's domain setup guide:
"Since search engines keep different metrics for domains than they do subdomains, it is recommended that webmasters place link-worthy content like blogs in subfolders rather than subdomains. (i.e. www.example.com/blog/ rather than blog.example.com) The notable exceptions to this are language-specific websites. (i.e., en.example.com for the English version of the website)."
I think that quote is pretty compelling towards the subdirectory side of this quandry. I also recommend checking out the comments on the Whiteboard Friday link you posted, there is plenty of evidence there as well.
Unfortunately, this debate will probably go on forever until we get definitive word from Google.
-
Can you share some details why you want to "move" the store locator to a subdomain? That makes me think it is already operational in a subfolder at the moment. In general, I would recommend not moving content unless there is a very good reason for it.
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
-
How to create a smooth blog migration from subdomain to subfolder main?
Hi mozzers, We have decided to migrate the blog subdomain to the domain's subfolder (blog.example.com to example.com/blog). To do this the most effective way and avoid impact SEO negatively I believe I have to follow this checklist: Create a list of all 301 redirects from blog.example.com/post-1 to example.com/post-1 Make sure title tags remain the same on main domain Make sure internal links remain the same Is there something else I am missing? Any other best practices? I also would like to have all blog post as AMPs. Any recommendations if this something we should do since we are not a media site? Any other tips on successfully implementing those types of pages? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ty19861 -
Subdomain cannibalization
Hi, I am doing the SEO for a webshop, which has a lot of linking and related websites on the same root domain. So the structure is for example: Root domain: example.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C
Shop: shop.example.com
Linking websites to shop: courses.example.com, software.example.com,... Do I have to check which keywords these linking websites are already ranking for and choose other keywords for my category and product pages on the webshop? The problem with this could be that the main keywords for the category pages on the webshop are mainly the same as for the other subdomains. The intention is that some people immediately come to the webshop instead of going first to the linking websites and then to the webshop. Thanks.0 -
Best SEO Strategy for Badges & Awards.
Hello Moz Friends! I was wondering what the correct "SEO friendly" strategy is with badges and awards. We recently got BBB accredited and added their badge to the footer of the website. We also added a review badge from shopper approved to the footer. As I'm joining other communities, I see there's badges given to us. For example, Alignable. Great place for networking. They offer a badge that says "locals recommend us" or something. Should I embed these badges onto our website someplace? Should I create a page for just badges or place them in the footer or sidebar widgets? What the best SEO practice for this? Thank you!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LindsayE2 -
Silo vs breadcrumbs in 2015
Hi ive heard silos being mentioned in the past to help with rankings does this still apply? and what about breadcrumbs do i use them with the silo technique or instead of which ones do you think are better or should i not be using these anymore with the recent google updates?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | juun0 -
Hreflang in vs. sitemap?
Hi all, I decided to identify alternate language pages of my site via sitemap to save our development team some time. I also like the idea of having leaner markup. However, my site has many alternate language and country page variations, so after creating a sitemap that includes mostly tier 1 and tier 2 level URLs, i now have a sitemap file that's 17mb. I did a couple google searches to see is sitemap file size can ever be an issue and found a discussion or two that suggested keeping the size small and a really old article that recommended keeping it < 10mb. Does the sitemap file size matter? GWT has verified the sitemap and appears to be indexing the URLs fine. Are there any particular benefits to specifying alternate versions of a URL in vs. sitemap? Thanks, -Eugene
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eugene_bgb0 -
What is the best URL structure for categories?
A client's site currently uses the URL structure: www.website.com/�tegory%/%postname% Which I think is optimised fairly well, as the categories are keywords being targeted. However, as they are using a category hierarchy, often times the URL looks like this: www.website.com/parent-category/child-category/some-post-titles-are-quite-long-as-they-are-long-tail-terms Best practise often dictates (such as point 3 in this Moz article) that shorter URLs are better for several reasons. So I'm left with a few options: Remove the category from the URL Flatten the category hierarchy Shorten post titles two a word or two - which would hurt my long tail search term traffic. Leave it as it is What do we think is the best route to take? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | underscorelive0 -
PDFs and images in Sub folder or subdomain?
What would you recommend as best practice? Our ecommerce site has a lot of PDFs supporting the product page. Currently they are kept in a sub domain and so are all images. Would it be better to keep them all in a subfolder? I've read about blogs being hosted on a subfolder to be better than subdomain but what about pdfs and images? thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
Create a new XML Sitemap for a blog subdomain?
What would be the best way to go about this? A site just put a blog on http://blog.domain.com/ Should there be a separate XML Sitemap for that particular subdomain or should the original XML Sitemap for the main domain be sufficient? Looking forward to your responses. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iAnalyst.com0