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.
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
-
C
This is one of the reasons I love this forum: it requires thinking because many who ask questions are thinking. (think about it;) While I understand what eyepaq is saying in one sense that search engines "could" treat them as stand alone; it appears search engines do/could because as the subdomain holder you are not seeing links going only to the main domain or other subs, you are the one who controls it, can move its hosting, etc. But, according to Google, they do not in the sense of linking:
If you own a site that’s on a subdomain (such as googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com) or in a subfolder (www.google.com/support/webmasters/) and don’t own the root domain, you’ll still only see links from URLs starting with that subdomain or subfolder in your internal links, and all others will be categorized as external links. We’ve made a few backend changes so that these numbers should be even more accurate for you.
Note that, if you own a root domain like example.com or www.example.com, your number of external links may appear to go down with this change; this is because, as described above, some of the URLs we were previously classifying as external links will have moved into the internal links report. Your total number of links (internal + external) should not be affected by this change.
So, as for external linking, it is clear that if there ever was a question about domains and subdomains, there is none now. But, that does not mean you should not use subdomains. Eyepaqs point around user abuse is an excellent one, but you should also be monitoring this like a hawk.
At the end of the day, I would think that using subdirectories is going to be easier if you are planning on a large site. But, the ease you mention for the user with the short domain name is intriguing. I agree with Muhammad on sub domains might get a little expensive and, if your choice is to use both (I wouldn't as it seems to me that you are creating more and more work for your dev team) the canonical should be the subdomain.
Again, thanks for the thought provoking question.
Robert
-
Hi,
Since it said that search engines treat subdomains as different stand-alone sites,
** Search engines could treat subdomains as different stand alone sites. Usually they don't. A good example when they do that is the blogspot subdomains - and that is because those are in fact separate stand alone sites.
In your case however, since it's about users, similar with blogspot somehow - google can treat them at som point as separate websites.
whats best for the main site? to show multiple search results with profiles in subdomains or subdirectories?
** My personal opinion is that from a user point of view you should go with the subdomains as you do right now - it make sense, it's easy for them to use those urls, to link to them and so on.
You could lose some link equity for the main domain if some or all subdomain will be at some point treated as separate domains but if you put everything on a scale, it will balance as advantages on the subdomain approach anyway.
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?
** To be honest I do see the point / advantages in doing that.
One other advantage is that if you go with subdomains and google will count them as separate websites, if one of your user is ding something stupid (trying to rank with it and start building gambling and porn links to that sub domain you will be safe with the root domain and the other users won't be affected.
Hope it helps.
Edited to underline the word could
-
Hi HaCos,
Well it depends on how many users are there? thousands of users with thousands of sub domains is an expensive option. Go for user subdirectories instead of sub domains. And as each user got a sub domain too, so make that sub domain canonical of user sub directory. Hope this answers your question.
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
-
Ecommerce store on subdomain - danger of keyword cannibalization?
Hi all, Scenario: Ecommerce website selling a food product has their store on a subdomain (store.website.com). A GOOD chunk of the URLs - primarily parameters - are blocked in Robots.txt. When I search for the products, the main domain ranks almost exclusively, while the store only ranks on deeper SERPs (several pages deep). In the end, only one variation of the product is listed on the main domain (ex: Original Flavor 1oz 24 count), while the store itself obviously has all of them (most of which are blocked by Robots.txt). Can anyone shed a little bit of insight into best practices here? The platform for the store is Shopify if that helps. My suggestion at this point is to recommend they all crawling in the subdomain Robots.txt and canonicalize the parameter pages. As for keywords, my main concern is cannibalization, or rather forcing visitors to take extra steps to get to the store on the subdomain because hardly any of the subdomain pages rank. In a perfect world, they'd have everything on their main domain and no silly subdomain. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alces0 -
Can subdomains hurt your primary domain's SEO?
Our primary website https://domain.com has a subdomain https://subDomain.domain.com and on that subdomain we have a jive-hosted community, with a few links to and fro. In GA they are set up as different properties but there are many SEO issues in the jive-hosted site, in which many different people can create content, delete content, comment, etc. There are issues related to how jive structures content, broken links, etc. My question is this: Aside from the SEO issues with the subdomain, can the performance of that subdomain negatively impact the SEO performance and rank of the primary domain? I've heard and read conflicting reports about this and it would be nice to hear from the MOZ community about options to resolve such issues if they exist. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BHeffernan1 -
Using the same image across the site?
Hi just wondering i'm using the same image across 20 pages which are optimized for SEO purposes. I was wondering is there issues with this from SEO standpoint? Will Google devalue the page because the same image is being used? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seowork2140 -
Sites in multiple countries using same content question
Hey Moz, I am looking to target international audiences. But I may have duplicate content. For example, I have article 123 on each domain listed below. Will each content rank separately (in US and UK and Canada) because of the domain? The idea is to rank well in several different countries. But should I never have an article duplicated? Should we start from ground up creating articles per country? Some articles may apply to both! I guess this whole duplicate content thing is quite confusing to me. I understand that I can submit to GWT and do geographic location and add rel=alternate tag but will that allow all of them to rank separately? www.example.com www.example.co.uk www.example.ca Please help and thanks so much! Cole
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ColeLusby0 -
How to track mentions with links using Mentions App
We have a large client that we've just taken on board for organic search marketing. A great client that continually gets links from the BBC, NY Times etc which actually takes care of having to do any marketing for them. However, they get 10-15 unlinked mentions per day. Just recently, they peaked at 32 mentions in one day from JUST websites. But I need a quick way to filter these out and check if there is a link pointing to their website. I want to be able to build up a list of opportunities without having to manually check each website. How do, Mozzlars!?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasondexter0 -
Meta Keywords: Should we use them or not?
I am working through our site and see that meta keywords are being used heavily and unnecessarily. Each of our info pages will have 2 or 3 keyword phrases built into them. Should we just duplicate the keyword phrases into the meta keyword field, should put in additional keywords beyond or not use it at all? Thoughts and opinions appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus1 -
Using 2 wildcards in the robots.txt file
I have a URL string which I don't want to be indexed. it includes the characters _Q1 ni the middle of the string. So in the robots.txt can I use 2 wildcards in the string to take out all of the URLs with that in it? So something like /_Q1. Will that pickup and block every URL with those characters in the string? Also, this is not directly of the root, but in a secondary directory, so .com/.../_Q1. So do I have to format the robots.txt as //_Q1* as it will be in the second folder or just using /_Q1 will pickup everything no matter what folder it is on? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seo1234560 -
Paging. is it better to use noindex, follow
Is it better to use the robots meta noindex, follow tag for paging, (page 2, page 3) of Category Pages which lists items within each category or just let Google index these pages Before Panda I was not using noindex because I figured if page 2 is in Google's index then the items on page 2 are more likely to be in Google's index. Also then each item has an internal link So after I got hit by panda, I'm thinking well page 2 has no unique content only a list of links with a short excerpt from each item which can be found on each items page so it's not unique content, maybe that contributed to Panda penalty. So I place the meta tag noindex, follow on every page 2,3 for each category page. Page 1 of each category page has a short introduction so i hope that it is enough to make it "thick" content (is that a word :-)) My visitors don't want long introductions, it hurts bounce rate and time on site. Now I'm wondering if that is common practice and if items on page 2 are less likely to be indexed since they have no internal links from an indexed page Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | donthe0