Moving to subdirectory from subdomain, where subdomain PR is equal to root domain PR

[brad-causes]

Hi all,

I'm currently in the process of revitalizing my company's blog. Currently, the blog sits on a subdomain (blog.rootdomain.com). SEO best practice dictates that I should move this (and 301 redirect the old URLs) to rootdomain.com/blog to concentrate link equity and avoid the risk of having search engines treat the subdomain as separate from the root domain.

However, the PageRank Status extension for Chrome is reporting that the PR for the blog on the subdomain and the root domain are the same. Is there any benefit to migrating the subdomain to a subdirectory? Is that data accurate enough to base decisions off of?

[brad-causes]

That logic seems incorrect since it doesn't account for root domain links that point to the subdomain. This would only apply if all the inbound links were from other root domains.

For example, my blog on the subdomain has 1.4M inbound links, 1.35M of which come from the root domain. I'm guessing this is because it's a footer link. So, the PR6 of the blog seems largely inherited from the root domain, which has a PR of 6.

Were you just trying to oversimplify it?

[MoosaHemani]

I am actually going to recommend you doing that as one of my client is going through the same problem and after a week or two of the instance conversation I convinced him to move from sub domain to a sub directory!

From the SEO point of view there might not be 4 +4 = 8 kind of thing but still at least you will end up having your DA nearer to double.

Just go for it!

[Devanur-Rafi]

I second to Egol's opinion here. Its great to have the sub-domain's PR equal to that of the root domain. You should move the sub-domain to sub-directory to leverage the link popularity of the sub-domain along with all SEO goodies that will further bolster the authority of the root domain. Previously, we faced an issue with sub-domain strategy despite unique content on all those sub-domains. We then moved the content from all the sub-domains to their respective sub-directories, deployed a 301 redirection pointing all the sub-domains' content to their corresponding pages on the sub-directories. The results were amazing. We not only regained the traffic loss but also had an increase in the organic traffic. Since then, I have been a keen advocate of sub-directory/folder structure.

Best of luck to you.

Devanur Rafi

[EGOL]

In math class you probably learned that 4 + 4 = 8?

Same principle here.