Subdomains vs directories on existing website with good search traffic

[damienthivolle]

Hello everyone,

I operate a website called Icy Veins (www.icy-veins.com), which gives gaming advice for World of Warcraft and Hearthstone, two titles from Blizzard Entertainment. Up until recently, we had articles for both games on the main subdomain (www.icy-veins.com), without a directory structure. The articles for World of Warcraft ended in -wow and those for Hearthstone ended in -hearthstone and that was it.

We are planning to cover more games from Blizzard entertainment soon, so we hired a SEO consultant to figure out whether we should use directories (www.icy-veins.com/wow/, www.icy-veins.com/hearthstone/, etc.) or subdomains (www.icy-veins.com, wow.icy-veins.com, hearthstone.icy-veins.com). For a number of reason, the consultant was adamant that subdomains was the way to go.

So, I implemented subdomains and I have 301-redirects from all the old URLs to the new ones, and after 2 weeks, the amount of search traffic we get has been slowly decreasing, as the new URLs were getting index. Now, we are getting about 20%-25% less search traffic. For example, the week before the subdomains went live we received 900,000 visits from search engines (11-17 May). This week, we only received 700,000 visits.

All our new URLs are indexed, but they rank slightly lower than the old URLs used to, so I was wondering if this was something that was to be expected and that will improve in time or if I should just go for subdomains.

Thank you in advance.

[JaneCopland]

Hi Damien,

So if I'm reading this correctly, the consultant is saying that due to the size of the site (tens of thousands of pages), and the need to categorise its content, that subdomains are the best choice.

I would say that there are far bigger websites using categories within subfolders, notably big retailers, e.g.

http://www.marksandspencer.com/c/beauty, http://www.marksandspencer.com/c/food-and-wine, http://www.marksandspencer.com/c/mands-bank

http://www.waitrose.com/home/inspiration.html, http://www.waitrose.com/home/wine.html, http://www.waitrose.com/content/waitrose/en/home/tv/highlights.html (<-- the last one being a crappy version, but a subdomain nonetheless)

and so do websites that deal with providing content for very different audiences:

http://www.ncaa.com/schools/tampa, http://www.ncaa.com/championships/lacrosse-men/d1/tickets, http://www.ncaa.com/news/swimming-men/article/2014-03-29/golden-bears-and-coach-david-durden-earn-third-national-title, http://www.ncaa.com/stats/football/fbs

Has the consultant provided examples of other websites doing this that would take on the same structure?

There are hundreds of examples of websites whose structure / categories are properly understood despite existing in subdirectories, so I'm still sceptical that this is a necessity.

This is not to say that a subdomain approach wouldn't work and is definitively bad or anything, I'm just not really convinced that the reasoning is strong enough to move content away from the root domain.

I disagree about user experience - from a user's perspective, the only difference between subfolders and subdomains is the URL they can see in the address bar. The rest is aesthetic. You can do or not do everything you'd do with the design of a website using subdirectories that you'd do with a website(s) employing subdomains. For example, just because content sits on www.icy-veins.com/wow/, its navigation wouldn't have to link to www.icy-veins.com/hearthstone/ or mention the other brand in any way if you don't want to. You can still have separate conversion funnels, newsletter sign-ups, advertising pages, etc.

[damienthivolle]

Thank you for shedding more light on the matter. Here are the reasons why our consultant thought that subdomains would be better:

In the case of ICY VEINS the matter is clear, subdomains will be the best of course of action and I will quickly explain why

-          The domain has over 10,000+ pages (my scan is still running looking at 66,000+ addresses already) which put it in a whole new category.  For smaller sites and even local business sites sub directories will always be the better choice

-          Sub Domains will allow you to categorize the different categories of your website.  The sub domains in mind are all relating to the gaming industry so it still makes it relevant to the global theme of the website.

-          Splitting up the different categories into subdomains will allow search engine to better differentiate the areas of your website (see attached image named icy-veins SERP – Sitelink.png).  At the moment Google do not properly categorize your areas of your website and uses your most popular visited areas as the given site links in the search engine results page)

-          However noting that you already have the sub directory /heartstone  a .htaccess 301 redirect for that whole directory will have to be set in place for any current.  This will ensure that any inbound links from other sites will be automatically redirected to the correct sub domain and index page.  Failing to implement the redirect will cause that the correct Page Authority and Domain Authority not to carry over to the sub domain. Technically heartstone.icy-veins.com and icy-veins.com is to separate domains according to the DNS that is why it is important to ensure that the redirects is in place to carry over any “seo juice” that the old directory had.

-          Sub domains enhances the user experience of your visitors by keeping to separate themes and topics.  This will have a positive impact on your bounce rate (which is currently sitting at 38% for the last 30 days) and better funnelling for goal conversions (i.e. donate | newsletter signup | advertise on our website

-          Essentially you are focusing on different products for the same brand

In the  end of the day it comes down to your personal preference although sub domains will be a better choice to ensure that your different products are split up and reflects better with the search engine results pages.

[JaneCopland]

Hi Damien,

There are cases where subdomains are very necessary or inevitable, usually because of technical limitations (and even then, they can usually be worked around via practices like reverse proxy). When you see subdomains in the wild and aren't sure why they're being used, they will often just be legacies - old set-ups that no one wants to change because it would require redirecting old URLs, which is inadvisable if those URLs don't need to be redirected and if they rank well.

In this case, I'd be really interested to know why the SEO was adamant that the new structure should use subdomains and not subdirectories. Google is much better at working with new subdomains now than it was in years past, but if there is no good reason to use them, subdirectories are still the safer option for SEO purposes, and the content housed on subdirectories should automatically inherit authority from the parent domain. New subdomains seem to be far less likely to inherit this authority, as other responders have said above.

Find out exactly why the SEO wanted subdomains - if their reasoning isn't solid, you may want to place this content in subdirectories and place 301 redirects from the subdomains to the subdirectories. If you are going to do these redirects, doing them sooner rather than later is advisable as redirection usually comes with a short period of lower rankings / traffic.

On that note, redirection does usually result with that short period of traffic loss, but that should happen quite quickly and be fixing itself in 2+ weeks, not getting worse.

[DeanAndrews]

Unfortunately yes you will need to 301 the subdomains back to the folder structure.

[damienthivolle]

Thank you Dean and Caitlin! So, I guess the next step would be to revert the change and switch to directories (using 301-redirects from the subdomains), right?

[DragonSearch]

I agree with Dean above. Subdomains split your authority. Basically, this means that Google considers wow.icey-veins.com and hearthstone.iceyveins.com as two separate websites in their book. For this reason, folders would have been the far better solution - the site's authority would have remained the same and any additional folders added to the site and resulting links to that folder would have continued to build up the website's authority.

Don't get me wrong, there are a number of websites that utilize subdomains (typically very large sites). In fact, it use to be very common in year's past. However, subdomains are no longer seen as SEO best practice. ^Caitlin

[DeanAndrews]

The advice to use sub domains is a wow in it self from an SEO point of view. Sub domains do not pass authority so it's basically like having a new domain for each sub domain.Folders would have been a far better solution in my opinion.

Interesting debate regarding the learning page re domains on Moz here: http://moz.com/community/q/moz-s-official-stance-on-subdomain-vs-subfolder-does-it-need-updating