To subdomain or to subfolder, that is the question.
-
Hi All,
So I have a client that has two restaurants that they are wanting two sites for. Right now they have one site for their two locations that ranks pretty well for some bigger keywords for their style of food.
With them wanting two sites, i'm struggling on whether we should just build them all within one site and just use separate folders on that site restaurant.com/location1 & restaurant.com/location2 with a landing page sending you to each, or if we should split it into subdomains. The content will be roughly the same, the menus are identical, i think each branch is just owned by a different family member so they want their own site.
I keep leaning towards building it all into one site but i'm not sure. Any ideas?
-
I agree with this approach, but I also would be trying to dig into _why _they think they want a second site instead of just coming back with a recommendation. What do they think that will accomplish for them? Sometimes clients will ask you to do something that they think will solve a problem when really they should be asking you how to solve the problem, and the situation as he's described it totally feels like one of those times to me.
-
Hi Alex,
Since you're talking about subdomains rather than separate domains and you mention "their style of food", it sounds like they're basically the same restaurant, just in different locations and owned by different family members?
If that's the case, having a separate landing page for each location is the way to go. This means you've only got one lot of content to write rather than 2 full websites and you only have to worry about building a single link profile as well.
You wouldn't even need different subfolders to separate these two, just a landing page for each. The menus are the same, the About Us page probably doesn't need to be any different and the Contact Us page can just offer details and/or a form for each on the one page. Really, the pages you'd need would probably look something like this:-
- Home page
- Location 1
- Location 2
- Menu
- Contact Us
You may want to create other pages on there of course but these would be your basics. If you went down the subfolder route and had a location, menu and contact page for each, that's just adding complexity and redundancy that you could do without. At the very least, the simplistic approach is going to help your crawl budget since engines won't be crawling 2 of everything.
Think of it a bit more like a franchise - present one brand on the site and have a landing page for the locations.
Hope that helps!
-
There's a business I work with as a web dev that has 2 nearly identical sites - one for their E-commerce business and the other for their local business. I haven't done a full SEO analysis on the sites, but I can tell you it's not working out well SEO-wise - they're pretty buried, and I would bet quite a bit it's because of duplicate content.
If the two restaurants are truly different, each should have its own website, with its own content, on its own domain. If the only difference is the street address then there should be 1 website with a "locations" page showing how to get to each location. If they're a bit different but share a name, I would build single website, but have a page, or couple of pages about each location, (so, I would have location-specific info in a folder, eg. restaurant.com/location2/the-chef). Does that make sense?
-
Hi there.
It's quite confusing the way you asking this question - they want two websites, but you gonna make one website? I understand you can use subfolders or subdomains, but if they are exactly the same restaurant, will they have different content? Do they want different designs? If so, what is going to be on main domain?
My suggestion would be to do one website with two location pages. This way, since content is the same they won't have duplicate content issues and it won't be confusing to users in case of different websites with different designs for the same restaurants.
Hope this makes sense.
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
-
Subdomain vs totally new domain
Problem: Our organization publish maps for public viewing using google maps. We are currently getting limited value from these links. We need to separate our public and private maps for infrastructure purposes, and are weighing up the strengths and weaknesses of separating by domain or sub domain with regards SEO and infrastructure. Current situation: maps.mycompany.com currently has a page authority of 30 and mycompany.com has a domain authority of 39. We are currently only getting links from 8 maps which are shared via social media whereas most people embed our maps on their website using an iframe which I believe doesn't do us any favour with SEO. We currently have approx 3K public maps. Question: What SEO impact can you see if we move our public maps from the subdomain maps.mycompany.com to mycompanypublicmaps.com? Thanks in advance for your help and happy to give more info if you need it!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eSpatial0 -
SSL and robots.txt question - confused by Google guidelines
I noticed "Don’t block your HTTPS site from crawling using robots.txt" here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html Does this mean you can't use robots.txt anywhere on the site - even parts of a site you want to noindex, for example?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Website, webshop and blog. Subfolders or subdomains?
Hello fellow mozzers, I've seen a lot of discussion and confusion about whether you should use subfolders or subdomains when you have a website, a blog and a webshop.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WesleySmits
Of course with subfolders the PageRank will be more effective since it's all in one domain. On the other hand subdomains will be a better user experience since you can focus on just the webshop or just the blog. Was wondering how you guys/girls think what would be the best way to handle this.0 -
Should I 301 a penalized domain to another domains subfolder?
I have a niche domain seems to have been hit by Penguin. It had very good rankings before the update, and I think at least a good part of the penalty might be due to overoptimized anchor text. So here is the question; If I decide to take this site down, should I 301 the entire domain to a relevant sub-folder of another site? i.e comtemporaryfurniture.com to domain.com/category/modern-furniture.html Will the penalty get passed onto the new domain? If the penalty is partly due to anchor text, then pointing it to another site's subfolder would mean the tartget URL has more varied anchor text and could boost rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
Questions about 301 Redirects
I have about 10 - 15 URLs that are redirecting to http://www.domainname.comwww.domainname.com/. (which is an invalid URL)The website is on a Joomla platform. Does anyone know how I can fix this? I can't figure out where the problem is coming from.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnParker27920 -
"Iffy" Question
Hi Guys and Girls, I have been studying SEO for a few years now. I have learned quite a bit along the way. One thing that I have had BEAT in my head is "Create Quality Content". When I used to ask "What Should I do to get more visits?" I was told, "Create QUALITY CONTENT". That was great advice, and I have done that. I have created over 600 pages since then. I went from 200 visits per month to now just over 5,000. Even more importantly, I have increased my lead conversions. I say all of this because, about two years ago I told a competitor basically how you rise up in the search engines. He turned around and bought a domain that was 3 years older than mine and had a main keyword in the domain. He then just started building links with a bunch of blog comments and forum posts (The blog comments have like 2,000 comments on them). In other words, he did what I would NOT do yet he is #5 for this keyword and I am #9. (Although, I turned around and built another site and now I am at #13 for that and it has been up for a year now. I say all this, not to bore you but to tell ask you, DOES IT WORK IF YOU DO BLOG COMMENTING, FORUM POSTING, LINK WHEELS, ETC. Do you obtain higher rankings? Should I be doing a bit of video marketing? I know a lot of people will say, "Why would you spend your time on things that may slightly impact your rankings, but obviously it did something for this guy. Any help you can give would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | blake-766241 -
Subdomains and SEO - Should we redirect to subfolder?
A new client has mainsite.com and a large numer of city specific sub domains i.e. albany.mainsite.com. I think that these subdomains would actually work better as subfolders i.e mainsite.com/albany rather than albany.mainsite.com. The majority of links on the subdomains link to the main site anyway i.e. mainsite.com/contactus rather than albany.mainsite.com/contactus. Having mostly main domain links on a subdomain doesnt seem like clever link architecture to me and maybe even spammy. Im not overly familiar with redirecting subdomains to subfolders. If we go the route of 301'ing subdomains to subfolders any advice/warnings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndyMacLean0 -
SEO question
Hi i changed my page titles for a competitive keyword last week and noticed it has dropped 9 search engine ranking positions. Was ranking 37 and now it 46. Would you guys leave it and see if it starts creeping back up or change again? the page title i used was across my pages for example was Primary keyword | secondary keyword | Heading on page thanks for you help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wazza19850