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.
The Great Subdomain vs. Subfolder Debate, what is the best answer?
-
Recently one of my clients was hesitant to move their new store locator pages to a subdomain. They have some SEO knowledge and cited the whiteboard Friday article at https://moz.com/blog/subdomains-vs-subfolders-rel-canonical-vs-301-how-to-structure-links-optimally-for-seo-whiteboard-friday.
While it is very possible that Rand Fiskin has a valid point I felt hesitant to let this be the final verdict. John Mueller from Google Webmaster Central claims that Google is indifferent towards subdomains vs subfolders.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h1t5fs5VcI#t=50
Also this SEO disagreed with Rand Fiskin’s post about using sub folders instead of sub domains. He claims that Rand Fiskin ran only 3 experiments over 2 years, while he has tested multiple subdomain vs subfolder experiments over 10 years and observed no difference.
http://www.seo-theory.com/2015/02/06/subdomains-vs-subfolders-what-are-the-facts-on-rankings/
Here is another post from the Website Magazine. They too believe that there is no SEO benefits of a subdomain vs subfolder infrastructure. Proper SEO and infrastructure is what is most important.
Again Rand might be right, but I rather provide a recommendation to my client based on an authoritative source such as a Google engineer like John Mueller.
Does anybody else have any thoughts and/or insight about this?
-
I think Mueller's main point may be that if you treat your subdomains separately from your main site, Google will treat them differently as well. For example, if you have three subdomains - www, blog and cloud - but all of them have different navigation, css and limited interlinking and little keyword theme commonality, Google will treat them as separate sites and you will suffer the dreaded subdomain issue.
BUT if you integrate the three domains well - same nav, same look & feel and lots of good contextual anchor text interlinking, Google will treat it as the same site and the subdomain issue will become moot.
Has anyone done any testing with those variables?
-
Yup! All the case studies I showed above (and plenty since) have demonstrated that you can boost traffic by moving from the subdomain to a subfolder.
-
Great thread! What about a situation where a blog already sits on a subdomain (bearing in mind it hasn't been driving a significant amount of traffic as the site is fairly new). My recommendation would be to move to subfolder, would you agree?
Thank you!
-
This is my new favorite quote... "I understand that Google's representatives have the authority of working at Google going for them, but I also believe they're wrong." (Rand Fishkin)
-
Greetings All,
So the debate goes on and I personally think the value of subfolders versus directories certainly makes sense especially from a linking, age and juice perspective. I do notice in most articles they talk about the benefits for subfolders as it relates to blogs. In past tests and studies, you have shed any insight into how this may affect ecommerce as it relates to countries.
We currently have each country on a subdomain and can run it through webmaster tools and geotarget the country however are considering switching to subfolders, based on all the articles we've read. This would in such drive many more links back to each new subfolder assuming the majority of our links are from "www". It would seem to make sense to switch to subfolders and would be especially helpful as new sub-folders were launched.
I was just wondering if the same argument can be made when it comes to ecommerce and country specific sites. Each site (currently different subdomains) uses a different language and currency. Meta and content is different for each. We launched "www" over 15 years ago but in the past 2 years have introduced various subdomains (ie new languages). As we enter into new countries, we are considering switching everything over to subfolders (obviously with 301'ing the subdomains over to the new subfolders so we dont lose all our existing links).
Im assuming since your studies indicate, you'd think this to be a good idea however all the talk has not been so much about countries and ecommerce. Any one have any light or information they can share with regards to the topic??
Thnkxs
-
Hi Rosemary - thankfully, I have data, not just opinions to back up my arguments:
- In 2014, Moz moved our Beginner's Guide to SEO from guides.moz.com to moz.com itself. Rankings rose immediately, with no other changes. We ranked higher not only for "seo guide" (outranking Google themselves) but also for "beginners guide" a very broad phrase.
- Check out https://iwantmyname.com/blog/2015/01/seo-penalties-of-moving-our-blog-to-a-subdomain.html - goes into very clear detail about how what Google says about subdomains doesn't match up with realities
- Check out some additional great comments in this thread, including a number from site owners who moved away from subdomains and saw ranking benefits, or who moved to them and saw ranking losses: https://inbound.org/discuss/it-s-2014-what-s-the-latest-thinking-on-sub-domains-vs-sub-directories
- There's another good thread (with some more examples) here: https://inbound.org/blog/the-sub-domain-vs-sub-directory-seo-debate-explained-in-one-flow-chart
Ultimately, it's up to you. I understand that Google's representatives have the authority of working at Google going for them, but I also believe they're wrong. It could be that there's no specific element that penalized subdomains and maybe they're viewed the same in Google's thinking, but there are real ways in which subdomains inherit authority that stay unique to those subdomains and it IS NOT passed between multiple subdomains evenly or equally. I have no horse in this race other than to want to help you and other site owners from struggling against rankings losses - and we've just seen too many when moving to a subdomain and too many gains moving to a subfolder not to be wary.
-
Hi,
I've not seen any comment from Googlers regarding this debate. I realize I'm keeping this in the Moz-sphere, which isn't quite what you're looking for, but this quote is from Moz's domain setup guide:
"Since search engines keep different metrics for domains than they do subdomains, it is recommended that webmasters place link-worthy content like blogs in subfolders rather than subdomains. (i.e. www.example.com/blog/ rather than blog.example.com) The notable exceptions to this are language-specific websites. (i.e., en.example.com for the English version of the website)."
I think that quote is pretty compelling towards the subdirectory side of this quandry. I also recommend checking out the comments on the Whiteboard Friday link you posted, there is plenty of evidence there as well.
Unfortunately, this debate will probably go on forever until we get definitive word from Google.
-
Can you share some details why you want to "move" the store locator to a subdomain? That makes me think it is already operational in a subfolder at the moment. In general, I would recommend not moving content unless there is a very good reason for it.
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
-
Migrating Subfolder content to New domain Safely
Hello everyone, I'm currently facing a challenging situation and would greatly appreciate your expertise and guidance. I own a website, maniflexa.com, primarily focused on the digital agency niche. About 3 months ago, I created a subfolder, maniflexa.com/emploi/, dedicated to job listings which is a completely different niche. The subfolder has around 120 posts and pages. Unfortunately, since I created the subfolder, the rankings of my main site have been negatively impacted. I was previously ranking #1 for all local digital services keywords, but now, only 2 out of 16 keywords have maintained their positions. Other pages have dropped to positions 30 and beyond. I'm considering a solution and would like your advice: I'm planning to purchase a new domain and migrate the content from maniflexa.com/emploi/ to newdomain.com. However, I want to ensure a smooth migration without affecting the main domain maniflexa.com rankings and losing backlinks from maniflexa.com/emploi/ pages. Is moving the subfolder content to a new domain a viable solution? And how can I effectively redirect all pages from the subfolder to the new domain while preserving page ranks and backlinks?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | davidifaso
I wish they did, but GSC doesn't offer a solution to migration content from subfolder to a new domain. 😢 Help a fellow Mozer. Thanks for giving a hand.0 -
Why do people put xml sitemaps in subfolders? Why not just the root? What's the best solution?
Just read this: "The location of a Sitemap file determines the set of URLs that can be included in that Sitemap. A Sitemap file located at http://example.com/catalog/sitemap.xml can include any URLs starting with http://example.com/catalog/ but can not include URLs starting with http://example.com/images/." here: http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html#location Yet surely it's better to put the sitemaps at the root so you have:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart
(a) http://example.com/sitemap.xml
http://example.com/sitemap-chocolatecakes.xml
http://example.com/sitemap-spongecakes.xml
and so on... OR this kind of approach -
(b) http://example/com/sitemap.xml
http://example.com/sitemap/chocolatecakes.xml and
http://example.com/sitemap/spongecakes.xml I would tend towards (a) rather than (b) - which is the best option? Also, can I keep the structure the same for sitemaps that are subcategories of other sitemaps - for example - for a subcategory of http://example.com/sitemap-chocolatecakes.xml I might create http://example.com/sitemap-chocolatecakes-cherryicing.xml - or should I add a sub folder to turn it into http://example.com/sitemap-chocolatecakes/cherryicing.xml Look forward to reading your comments - Luke0 -
P.O Box VS. Actual Address
We have a website (http://www.delivertech.ca) that uses a P.O Box number versus an actual address as their "location". Does this affect SEO? Is it better to use an actual address? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Web3Marketing870 -
Best Practices for Converting PDFs to HTML
We're working with a client who gets about 80% of their organic, inbound search traffic from links to PDF files on their site. Obviously, this isn't ideal, because someone who just downloads a PDF file directly from a Google query is unlikely to interact with the site in any other way. I'm looking to develop a plan to convert those PDF files to HTML content, and try to get at least some of those visitors to convert into subscribers. What's the best way to go about this? My plan so far is: Develop HTML landing pages for each of the popular PDFs, with the content from the PDF, as well as the option to download the PDF with an email signup. Gradually implement 301 redirects for the existing PDFs, and see what that does to our inbound SEO traffic. I don't want to create a dip in traffic, although our current "direct to inbound" traffic is largely useless. Are their things I should watch out for? Will I get penalized by Google for redirecting a PDF to HTML content? Other things I should be aware of?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | atourgates0 -
URL Rewriting Best Practices
Hey Moz! I’m getting ready to implement URL rewrites on my website to improve site structure/URL readability. More specifically I want to: Improve our website structure by removing redundant directories. Replace underscores with dashes and remove file extensions for our URLs. Please see my example below: Old structure: http://www.widgets.com/widgets/commercial-widgets/small_blue_widget.htm New structure: https://www.widgets.com/commercial-widgets/small-blue-widget I've read several URL rewriting guides online, all of which seem to provide similar but overall different methods to do this. I'm looking for what's considered best practices to implement these rewrites. From what I understand, the most common method is to implement rewrites in our .htaccess file using mod_rewrite (which will find the old URLs and rewrite them according to the rewrites I implement). One question I can't seem to find a definitive answer to is when I implement the rewrite to remove file extensions/replace underscores with dashes in our URLs, do the webpage file names need to be edited to the new format? From what I understand the webpage file names must remain the same for the rewrites in the .htaccess to work. However, our internal links (including canonical links) must be changed to the new URL format. Can anyone shed light on this? Also, I'm aware that implementing URL rewriting improperly could negatively affect our SERP rankings. If I redirect our old website directory structure to our new structure using this rewrite, are my bases covered in regards to having the proper 301 redirects in place to not affect our rankings negatively? Please offer any advice/reliable guides to handle this properly. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheDude0 -
Sitemaps during a migration - which is the best way of dealing with them?
Many SEOs I know simply upload the new sitemap once the new site is launched - some keep the old site's URLs on the new sitemap (for a while) to facilitate the migration - others upload both the old and the new website together, to support the migration. Which is the best way to proceed? Thanks, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
How To Best Close An eCommerce Site?
We're closing down one of our eCommerce sites. What is the best approach to do this? The site has a modest link profile (a young site). It does have a run of site link to the parent site. It also has a couple hundred email subscribers and established accounts. Is there a gradual way to do this? How do I treat the subscribers and account holders? The impact won't be great, but I want to minimize collateral damage as much as possible. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads0 -
What's your best hidden SEO secret?
Don't take that question too serious but all answers are welcome 😉 Answer to all:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | petrakraft
"Gentlemen, I see you did you best - at least I hope so! But after all I suppose I am stuck here to go on reading the SEOmoz blog if I can't sqeeze more secrets from you!9