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
-
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 -
Pagination loading with using AJAX. Should I change this?
Hello, while I was checking this site; http://www.disfracessimon.com/disfraces-adultos-16.html I found that the pagination is working this way http://www.disfracessimon.com/disfraces-adultos-16.html#/page-2
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite
http://www.disfracessimon.com/disfraces-adultos-16.html#/page-3 and content is being loaded using AJAX. So, google is not getting the paginated results. Is this a big issue or there is no problem?
Should I create a link for See All Products or there is not a big issue? Thank you!0 -
Using a lot of "Read More" Hidden text
My site has a LOT of "read more" and when a user click they will see a lot of text. "read more" is dark blue bold and clear to the user. It is the perfect for the user experience, since right below I have pictures and videos which is what most users want. Question: I expect few users will click "Read more" (however, some users will appreciate chance to read and learn more) and I wonder if search engines may think I am hiding text and this is a risky approach or simply discount the text as having zero value from an SEO perspective? Or, equally important: If the text was NOT hidden with a "Read more" would the text actually carry more SEO value than if it is hidden under a "read more" even though users will NOT read the text anyway? If yes, reason may be: when the text is not hidden, search engines cannot see that users are not reading it and the text carry more weight from an SEO perspective than pages where text is hidden under a "Read more" where users rarely click "read more".
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
How does the use of Dynamic meta tags effect SEO?
I'm evaluating a new client site which was built buy another design firm. My question is they are dynamically creating meta tags and I'm concerned that it is hurting their SEO. When I view the page source this is what I see. <meta name="<a class="attribute-value">keywords</a>" id="<a class="attribute-value">keywordsGoHere</a>" content="" /> <meta name="<a class="attribute-value">description</a>" id="<a class="attribute-value">descriptionGoesHere</a>" content="" /> <title id="<a class="attribute-value">titleGoesHere</a>">title> To me it looks like the tags are not being added to the page, however the title is showing when you view it in a browser and if use a spider view tool, it sees the title. I'm guess it is being called from a DB. So I'm a little concerned though that the search engines are not really seeing the title and description. I'm not worried about the keywords tag. Can anyone shed some light on how this might work? Why it might not being showing the text for the description in the page code and if that will hurt SEO? Thanks for the help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BbeS0 -
Follow or nofollow to subdomain
Hi, I run a hotel booking site and the booking engine is setup on a subdomain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vmotuz
The subdomain is disabled from being indexed in robots.txt Should the links from the main domain have a nofollow to the subdomain? What are you thoughts? Thanks!0 -
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 -
Is it bad to host an XML sitemap in a different subdomain?
Example: sitemap.example.com/sitemap.xml for pages on www.example.com.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOTGT0 -
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