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.
Subdomains for niche related keywords
-
I wanted to know how efficient using a subdomain is, taking in consideration all the updates Google has made lately.
I am looking to use a subdomain for a well branded website for a niche specific part of their website. The subdomain will end-up having more than 100 pages.
I'd like to see in what cases do you guys recommend using a subdomain? How to get the same benefit out of a subdomain as i am getting from the actual main domain?
-
I agree with you and thank you for your answer but at the same time i am more worried abt the structural standpoint - as i responded above to one of the replies - use the example with the hospital
A hospital may target very general related keywords but then it may offer very specific services and programs that are all indirectly related. Now those programs are very niche related and specific for certain types of surgeries and services offered, they contain a lot of information and can be expanded way above the 10 pages mentioned.
Now the question is what do you do in that case? You'd rather have 5 sub folders divided in other 20-30 categories and subcategories? Or you would rather have them structured in a better way on a sub-domain? What would be your choice in this case?
-
ok the main website targets 5 very competitive niches. They are different niches and they all offer different types of services.
as a good example would be a hospital that offers a couple of different programs and surgeries. Each program offers a different service, and targets different niche related keywords. But because the main site offers all of those its hard to categorize them in subfolders.
-
You will be doubling your workload, essentially starting a brand new website from scratch in the same niche. I feel I need to make that very clear.
You asked about efficiency and that's pretty much the core of what I'm talking about, subdomains are inefficient.
Niche subdirectories are by far the better option.
-
Cary,
In my opinion sub-domains should be used for completely different content. If your niche has anything to do with the current site then a sub-folder is the way to go. Can you provide more info on the current site and the new niche?
DD
-
Ok so my understanding is that if you don't mind doing the extra work for a sub-domain then you do recommended it being used. Do you see sub-domains as achieving better placements down the road if the necessary extra work will be put into these?
-
I can't speak for the Panda update, but I do agree with Daniel Deceuster, subdomains have been treat historically as separate sites. So unless things have changed dramatically you will essentially be starting from scratch link and work wise.
Subfolders may not be as neat or compartmentalised as sub-domains, but they are unambiguously under the ownership of the domain in question. Search engines can trust that.
Almost all of this work is about reducing ambiguity for the search engines, and sometimes that is at the cost of elegance.
-
how about from a category standpoint - on the main site if you are creating a subfolder you are limited to how deep u structure your categories as opposed to a subdomain you have more flexibility and are able to categorize those 100 pages much cleaner and user friendly
how about if you target a different geo location? wouldnt that be optimized better with a subdomain?
-
SEO rule #1: Never use subdomains. Ever. For any reason.
Ask yourself this, what's the difference between putting these 100 pages on a subdomain as opposed to a subdirectory? None? Then why bother? Make it a subdirectory!
99 times out of 100 you will say no difference to the question above. In the random instance that you do have some kind of reasoning for using a subdomain that will get you something different, then sure, why not, but I doubt you can find a reason. Subdomains are treated as separate domains by Google. Why would you hinder your SEO efforts for no reason? Just put your 100 pages in a subdirectory of the domain and link to it from your website internally. That's all I would do.
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
-
Keyword difficulty and time to rank
Hello, Is there a correlation between the keyword difficult and the time it takes to rank ? In other words let's say I try to rank for the keyword "seo" and it is going to take 2 years to rank 1 st whereas if I go for "best seo tools in 2018" and it takes just 2 weeks ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Feb 9, 2021, 3:09 PM | seoanalytics0 -
How ot optimise a website for competitive keywords?
Hi guys, I hope to find some good answers to my questions, because here are some of the best SEO's in the world. I'm doing SEO as a hobby for a few years and had some very good results before the latest Google updates. Now I'm not able to rank any website for competitive keywords. The last project I started is this website (man and van hire company targeting London market).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Mar 13, 2016, 10:01 PM | nasi_bg
The problem is that I can't rank even in Top 100 in Google UK for the main keywords like: "man and van london" , "man and van service london" ,"london man & van"...
The site has over 1k good backlinks (according to Ahrefs), unique content, titles and descriptions but still can't rank well. Am i missing something? Few years back that was more than enough to rank well in Google.
I will be very grateful to hear your suggestions and opinions.0 -
Advanced SEO - What would you do after you run out of keywords?
Hello! Our company has been growing in terms of traffic and ranking well for a couple of years but we are now kind of stagnating because we just don't know what to do next. We have a good blog - and with our blogs, we have been targeting all major keywords with their related keywords as a bucket. - "keyword theme / page" for a long time. But it seems we now don't have any major keyword theme to write about. What is worse is that we don't see any traffic growth since 2014 September. (although we added many good blogs) So what would do you when you run out of keywords? or keyword themes? Would you just keep pumping in more blogs and hope that you get more clicks? or at some point, you just don't care about keywords and write whatever relevant to your site? Wouldn't it hurt our site if we create similar keyword themed pages? (like regurgitating our keywords?) or even same keyword targeting pages? You must have similar experience if you are an owner of a niche site. Can you please share your experience with this kind of headaches? Thank you and look forward to your comments.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | May 6, 2015, 12:07 PM | joony3 -
Importing Keyword Planner Data into Excel?
What is the most efficient way to import search volume information into excel? We have 130K keywords that we need search volume information for.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Oct 20, 2014, 3:38 PM | nicole.healthline0 -
Subdomain for every us state?
Hi, one of our clients has an idea of making subdomains from his main website to sell his online advertisements in all states in USA. f.e: texas.web.com atlanta.web.com He wants to have a subdomain for every state and there to be information related only or mainly to this state? I am not sure about is this a good idea? What is your opinion about it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jan 16, 2013, 12:06 PM | vladokan0 -
How many time should a keyword be used in the body of text?
We employee an outside agency to write content for our website as we do not have the ability in house to write unique and good quality content. They have just sent an article which is around 300 words. I told them the keyword phrases to use. When I got the document there is only 1 instance of the keyword phrase(s) in it. Now there seems to be a conflict here amongst posts I have read and general SEO advise as to how many times it should be present (SEOmoz indicates 4 times for instance), our outside agency says it doesn't matter. Now if I have a page optimised for 2 keywords this starts making things tricky and probably looks keyword stuffed to the reader. Assuming the keywords are present once in meta tags, H1, meta descriptions and alt text, what do people think is best practice taking into account recent panda updates? Thoughts appreciated. Thanks Craig
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Aug 30, 2012, 2:34 PM | Towelsrus0 -
Franchise sites on subdomains
I've been asked by a client to optimise a a webpage for a location i.e. London. Turns out that the location is actually a franchise of the main company. When the company launch a new franchise, so far they have simply added a new page to the main site, for example: mysite.co.uk/sub-folder/london They have so far done this for 10 or so franchises and task someone with optimising that page for their main keyword + location. I think I know the answer to this, but would like to get a back up / additional info on it in terms of ranking / seo benefits. I am going to suggest the idea of using a subdomain for each location, example: london.mysite.co.uk Would this be the correct approach. If you think yes, why? Many thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Mar 5, 2012, 3:11 PM | Webrevolve0 -
Subdomains and SEO - Should we redirect to subfolder?
A new client has mainsite.com and a large numer of city specific sub domains i.e. albany.mainsite.com. I think that these subdomains would actually work better as subfolders i.e mainsite.com/albany rather than albany.mainsite.com. The majority of links on the subdomains link to the main site anyway i.e. mainsite.com/contactus rather than albany.mainsite.com/contactus. Having mostly main domain links on a subdomain doesnt seem like clever link architecture to me and maybe even spammy. Im not overly familiar with redirecting subdomains to subfolders. If we go the route of 301'ing subdomains to subfolders any advice/warnings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Nov 1, 2011, 12:54 PM | AndyMacLean0