Subdirectories vs subdomains

[hectorpn]

Hi SEO gurus  

Anyone has input on what's better?

blog.domain.com vs domain.com/blog

store.domain.com vs domain.com/store

etc

I think the subdir (/xyz) will concentrate authority on the same subdomain so should be better? However sometimes it is tidier on the server to maintain online stores or blogs in a separate strucutre so subdomains work better in that sense. I just want to make sure that doesn't affect SEO?

Cheers!

[hectorpn]

Thanks for the responses Yumi, @oznappies & Aaron

[AaronSchinke]

Sub directories/folders used to be the definite way to go for the most SEO value however things have evened out for the most part. I think sub directories are more user friendly... we are used to the slash... extra periods can get tricky.

[oznappies]

I've asked this one on here before and have some test sites trialling both ways and the sub-directory gains rank much faster from the root than the sub-domain.

[IKT]

in my opinion? definitely subdirectory. and in fact it will still be tidier on the server maintainability ..

For example please consider the following setup

you have your MYDOMAIN.com located at /var/www/html-mydomain

and by using a SUBDOMAIN.MYDOMAIN.COM, you will generally have them at /var/www/html-subdomain-mydomain

it looks tidier as you said it BUT you can achieve exactly the same thing using MOD_REWRITE

so perhaps right now your MYDOMAIN.com/SUB is located at /var/www/html-mydomain/SUB right? you can actually write a .htaccess that whenever user is going to MYDOMAIN.com/SUB it actually load the page under /var/www/html-subdomain-mydomain instead ! (so the server maintainability between using the subdirectory and subdomain will be exactly the same)

a much more technical example , put this inside your .htaccess of your root domain home directory

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}   ^[www\.]*sub-domain-name.domain-name.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/sub-domain-directory/.*
RewriteRule   ^(.*)  /sub-domain-directory/$1  [L]

This will cause the following situation

when people go to http://sub-domain-name.domain-name.com/a.html AND http://domain-name.com/sub-domain-directory/a.html

both of them will open your /sub-domain-directory/a.html instead

hope this help