Subdomain or subfolder?
-
Hello,
We are working on a new site. The idea of the site is to have an ecommerce shop, but the homepage will be a content page, basically a blog page.
My developer wants to have the blog (home) page on a subdomain, so blog.example.com, because it will be easier to make a nice content page this way, and the the rest of the site will just be on the root domain (example.com). I'm just worried that this will be bad for our SEO efforts. I've always thought it was better to use a sub folder rather than a subdomain. If we get links to the content on the subdomain, will the link juice flow to the shop, on the root domain?What are your thoughts?
-
Hi OP,
Not sure what your developer is planning on using but you could easily have some sort of combination of a blog + shop using Wordpress and Woo-Commerce.
Why you would specifically want a blog on the homepage and then a shop within a folder is beyond me (surely the otherway round; e-commer site + a blog), but I know for a fact it would be very easy to do for the average Wordpress developer!
Kind regards and good luck!
Nick
-
The only real info I've seen direct from Google on a similar subject, is on this page:
If you scroll down, there's a table on the page. It's a table of Google's supposed views on the pros and cons of different configurations (e.g: sub-folders vs sub domains) when considering an international roll-out. Obviously your situation is slightly different
All I'd say is, your home-page is supposed to be the top of the tree. The main page from which all other sub-things (including sub pages and sub domains) stem from
That being the case - why the heck would you have the homepage on a sub-domain sub-page? It's kind of like building an automobile with its wheels on the roof
I can't find any specific guidance on why you shouldn't do this. But my suspicion is, no one has felt the need to write much on it because it seems like sheer lunacy
If you have a developer / designer who can't work with a normal structure, I**'d probably replace them with someone more competent**. That to me sounds like very worrying whinging (and I'm usually someone who backs devs to the hilt!)
-
The question is why would you want to put the homepage of your webshop on a subdomain or subfolder?
I suppose your developer works with predefined frames for the pages of your webshop. If the homepage requires a different lay-out, the frame should be modified (custom coded). Same goes for your category or tag pages. These should have valuable content too and can't all be placed in different subdomains.
Regarding the use of subdomain or subfolder, this is a great article: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/subdomains-vs-subfolders-seo/239795/#close
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
-
Bloking pages in roborts.txt that are under a redirected subdomain
Hi Everyone, I have a lot of Marketo landing pages that I don't want to show in SERP. Adding the noindex meta tag for each page will be too much, I have thousands of pages. Blocking it in roborts.txt could have been an option, BUT, the subdomain homepage is redirected to my main domain (with a 302) so I may confuse search engines ( should they follow the redirect or should they block) marketo.mydomain.com is redirected to www.mydomain.com disallow: / (I think this will be confusing with the redirect) I don't have folders, all pages are under the subdomain, so I can't block folders in Robots.txt also Would anyone had this scenario or any suggestions? I appreciate your thoughts here. Thank you Rachel
Technical SEO | | RaquelSaiz0 -
Canonical vs Alternate for country based subdomain dupe content?
What's the correct method for tagging dupe content between country based subdomains? We have: mydomain.com // default, en-us www.mydomain.com // en-us uk.mydomain.com // uk, en-gb au.mydomain.com // australia, en-au eu.mydomain.com // europe, en-eu In the header of each we currently have rel="alternate" tags but we're still getting dupe content warnings in Moz for the "WWW" subdomain. Question 1) Are we headed in the right direction with using alternate? Or would it be better to use canonical since the languages are technically all English, just different regions. The content is pretty much the same minus currency and localization differences. Question 2) How can we solve the dupe content between WWW and the base domain, since the above isn't working. Thanks so much
Technical SEO | | lvdh11 -
Removed Subdomain Sites Still in Google Index
Hey guys, I've got kind of a strange situation going on and I can't seem to find it addressed anywhere. I have a site that at one point had several development sites set up at subdomains. Those sites have since launched on their own domains, but the subdomain sites are still showing up in the Google index. However, if you look at the cached version of pages on these non-existent subdomains, it lists the NEW url, not the dev one in the little blurb that says "This is Google's cached version of www.correcturl.com." Clearly Google recognizes that the content resides at the new location, so how come the old pages are still in the index? Attempting to visit one of them gives a "Server Not Found" error, so they are definitely gone. This is happening to a couple of sites, one that was launched over a year ago so it doesn't appear to be a "wait and see" solution. Any suggestions would be a huge help. Thanks!!
Technical SEO | | SarahLK0 -
How to Handle Subdomains with Irrelevant Content
Hi Everyone, My company is currently doing a redesign for a website and in the process of planning their 301 redirect strategy, I ran across several subdomains that aren't set up and are pointing to content on another website. The site is on a server that has a dedicated IP address that is shared with the other site. What should we do with these subdomains? Is it okay to 301 them to the homepage of the new site, even though the content is from another site? Should we try to set them up to go to the 404 page on the new site?
Technical SEO | | PapercutInteractive0 -
Link from Blogspot.com subdomain...
I have found an author that has an article about a particular product we sell online. I was thinking of speaking to them about getting a link to our site. But then I looked at the stats: <label>Page:</label><label id="Page Authority" class="key lsdata">PA:1</label><label id="mozrank" class="key lsdata" title="MozRank">mR:0.00</label>mT:0.00<label id="SEOmoz-data-uid">0</label> links from
Technical SEO | | bjs2010
<label id="SEOmoz-data-uipl">0</label> Root Domains<label>Root Domain:</label>**<label id="dom-pageauthority" class="key lsdata" title="Domain Authority">DA: 59</label>**24,797,212 links from
<label id="SEOmoz-data-pid">110,858</label> Domains<label>Subdomain:</label>Its on a subdomain of blogspot.com - and the page is relevant to a particular category and our e-commerce site.Is it worth pursuing the link?Thanks!0 -
I always get this error "We have detected that the domain or subfolder does not respond to web requests." I don't know why. PLEASE help
subdomain www.nwexterminating.com subfolder www.nwexterminating.com/pest_control www.nwexterminating.com/termite_services www.nwexterminating.com/bed_bug_services
Technical SEO | | NWExterminating0 -
Can SEOMoz crawl a single page as oppose to an entire subfolder?
I would like the following page to be crawled: http://www.ob.org/_programs/water/water_index.asp Instead, SEOMoz changes the page to the following subfolder which is an invalid url: http://www.ob.org/_programs/water/
Technical SEO | | OBIAnalytics0 -
Passing SEO value from a subdomain
Hi Everybody, I have built a website (http://rugby.europcar.ie) which has gone viral and getting huge amounts of traffic world wide. The problem is, all the Facebook shares, tweets and other social traffic is all referencing the subdomain, and now www.europcar.ie where I want to build rankings. What are my best options for referring this ranking power to my main domain? Thanks in advance Ronan
Technical SEO | | notnem0