Subdomain vs root which is better for SEO
-
We run a network of sites that we are considering consolidating into one main site with multiple categories. Which would be better having each of the "topics / site" reside in subdomains or as a sub-folder off of the root? Pros and cons of each would be great.
Thanks,
TR
-
This might shed a little more light on the subject.
The sites are per video game. So they could be completely different from one another.
I like the way a subdomain looks and for this purpose, I've seen other sites doing it this way for a long time.
From where I sit subdomains seem to be the "right" way to go about this but if sub-dirs are going to be BETTER for SEO then I want to do that.
I don't mind SEOing multiple sites and I would somewhat prefer to keep things separated out like that.
I guess what I really want to know is, Is this a personal preference thing if workload isn't my concern? Or is one going to be objectively better than the other.
Thanks for the replies so far. Much appreciated.
-
Agree with Irving - it's better to have subfolders most of the time. The essential question is who will be controlling the SEO? If it's one person or company, use subfolders. If multiple people will each control their own content, use subdomains. Think about this like Wordpress.com does.
Subdomains are somewhat treated as a separate website. So if you split them, you end up doing the SEO work more than once. Subfolders are considered part of the domain so http://mysite.wordpress.com is separate from Wordpress.com while http://www.wordpress.com/info/index.html is considered part of Wordpress.com Make sense?
So if you use subdomains, each subdomain needs its own SEO. If you use subfolders all the work can be done to one site, which is usually much more efficient. The best use of subdomains is if you had say a franchise (boston.yoursite.com, chicago.yoursite.com, melbourne.yoursite.com) where each of the franchisees would be responsible for their own marketing or a site like Wordpress that allows you to build your own content (thus under many people's control.) That would be site.wordpress.com, site2.wordpress.com etc.
Wordpress doesn't "care" to SEO all those sites nor necessarily do they want to pass their own SEO juice onto those sites as subfolders so they've made them subdomains.
-
directories are better than subdomains. subdomains are seen as different sites, directory allows you to have one main site and pass the PR throughout the entire site to create a stronger enterprise.
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 I run a successful SEO campaign for a subdomain?
My company has been around for several years now and hasn't really paid much mind to SEO or search engine rankings, so now I'm an in-house marketer with moderate SEO knowledge. We're setting up an article site with our help pages and blog under a subdomain so our writers can easily post articles without having to go through developers every time, as our root domain was set up with a custom in-house CMS. Is it possible for me to run a successful SEO campaign for our article site subdomain? I get that the root domain wouldn't benefit from any SEO authority the new site obtains, but my hands are tied.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teachbanzai0 -
AJAX requests and implication for SEO
Hi, I got a question in regard to webpages being served via AJAX request as I couldn't find a definitive answer in regard to an issue we currently face: When visitors on our site select a facet on a Listing Page, the site doesn't fully reload. As a consequence only certain tags of the content (H1, description,..) are updated, while other tags like canonical URLs, meta noindex,nofollow tag, or the title tag are not updating as long as you don't refresh the page. We have no information about how this will be crawled and indexed yet but I was wondering if anyone of you knows, how this will impact SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FashionLux0 -
Where do we focus from an SEO perspective?
I run a digital business development consulting company. Our core has always been centered around consulting with client to develop strategy and then working with a set of vendors in a variety of different services types to implement the strategy. I'm struggling right now to determine the best approach for our own SEO. Our website is http://phase2solutions.net. What suggestions would you have on the approach here? Feel free to share your service as well as the tactical end is something we are looking to outsource. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | phase2solutions0 -
Does subdomain hurt SEO on main site
This client sells event management software and puts all their clients on different subdomains of their main domain. Looking in SEO tools like OSE, when I run a backlink analysis, it pulls up all the backlinks to the subdomains as well as those for the main domain. In webmaster tools when I look at queries, impressions and clicks, they get at least 30 times more traffic and impressions on keywords found in their subdomains and very few on their own. In other words, all these tools are providing a collective analysis of main domain and all subdomains. All the backlinks and keywords recorded for those subdomains are not at all relevent to the keywords they want to rank for. For example, their software supports Boy Scouts, so keywords they rank for according to WT include merit badge, scout camp, etc., but of course, that's on the subdomain. As a result, if you were to take a snapshot of their online presence as these tools do, you would think they were a boy scout website and not a software developer if you include the subdomain, along with its PR, backlinks, keywords, etc. So the question I have is, does Google connect all these subdomains with the main domain and then water down the main site with irrelevant keywords, content and backlinks? Or does Google see all those subdomains as completely separate and we don't need to worry or move their clients off their subdomain? I'm worried about Google assigning a "boy scout" relevancy to them. Am I wrong? What would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | katandmouse0 -
Multi-Location SEO: Sites vs Pages
I just started with a new company that requires multi-location SEO for its niche product/service. Currently, we have a main corporate website, as well as, 40+ individual dealer websites (we host all). Keep in mind each of these dealers consist of only 1-2 people, so corporate I will be managing the site or sites and content strategy. Many of the individual dealer sites actually rank very well (#1-#3) in their areas for our targeted keywords, but they all use the same duplicate content. Also, there are many dealer sites that have dropped off the radar in last year, which is probably because of the duplicate and static content. So I'm at a crossroads... Attempt to redo all of these location sites with unique and local content for each or Create optimized unique pages for each of them on our main site and redirect their current local domains to their page on our site Any advise regarding which direction to go in and why. Why is very important. It will be very difficult to convince a dealer that is #1 with his local site that we are redirecting to our main site, so I need some good ammo and reasoning. Also, any tips toward achieving local seo success will be greatly appreciated, too! Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | the-coopersmith0 -
301 vs 302
We recently launched a redesign and I noticed from running a crawl using Screaming Frog SEO that our redirects are all being seen as 302. I know 302 is a temporary redirect, but does this hurt SEO rankings when all our redirects are being seen as 302s instead of 301s? Also, the way I implemented the redirects was by using the IIS Manager Tool. Is it possible that our IIS Manager Tool is not configured properly and instead of adding the redirect as 301, it is inserting it into the rewrite file as 302s?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rexjoec0 -
SEO Feedback Please
Hi, I was hoping to get some feedback on this site's SEO: http://www.chantre.com/ I also have different URLs which can be accessed from the left side of the site under "Quick Search Links" that go to the different offices within this company. Thoughts on how to improve would be great. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gXe0 -
Critique My Site For SEO
Hi Everyone, I was wondering if someone might critique my site and let me know what you think. I've done pretty much everything I know to do proper seo for my site. I'd love to hear some critiques about what I am doing wrong. I'm not sure if my titles are okay, being that they are similar amongst pages. The other thing is that for all the javascript buttons on the top I have no followed them since they don't have any anchor text. The way google will crawl my page is through the links in the footer. I was thinking of moving them throughout the body of the page since I hear google isn't giving as much weight to footer links. I also wanted to hear what you think about putting a blog on my site and updating with fresh content as opposed to creating a separate blog and then linking back to my website with anchor text. Thanks for all the help. And glad to be a member Bill
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wsh150