Are Wildcard Subdomain Hurting my SEO?

[PostAlmostAnything]

I have some sites with a lot of categories (category, sub-category, sub-subcategory) and locations (country, state/territory, city). To avoid listing pages really deep in my hierarchy I used wildcard subdomains for the locations, but lately I have been told that might be hurting my overall SEO efforts.

I have a lot of URLs like https://city-state-country.example.com on one side of the domain and example.com/category/subcategory/subsubcategory on the other. In the middle you see stuff like city-state-country.example.com/category/subcategory/subsubcategory and everything in between.

Would I be better off moving the locations to the right side of the domain name? Then you might find stuff like example.com/country/state/city/category/subcategory/subsubcategory and everything in between. I think I could do the new rewrite rules fairly easily since every country slug is just two characters long.

[terentyev]

@postalmostanything this is a tricky question that seems to be very simple at first. But let's dive a little deeper.

First thing to keep in mind is your budget and your business goals. If you are planning to dominate SERPs for each city or country, and you have the money to spend, the subdomains will give you much stronger local positions.

If this is your case, let's also consider if you want to have domains on country level or on city level: country level subdomains can be targeted in Google Search Console to a particular country, which will give you stronger position in each country.
City level subdomains are worth pursuing if your services/products are triggering the local three-pack. Eg. think of "hairdressers near me", etc. If not, most likely city-level subdomains is a dead end.

Now, let's consider another variant of having a single domain with subfolder structure. The clear benefit of this approach is much smaller SEO investments in linkbuilding. And you can still target each folder to a specific country if you register these folders in Google Search Console as a separate property. The downfall -probably less chances to be on the top in some of the most competitive local markets.

There is a third approach as well - do a hybrid model: pick up the top markets that are most critical for your business, and decide on city/country granularity for this group of cities/countries. And then move the rest to one single domain.

Unfortunately, I cannot spell out the full decision-making tree for this subdomain/folder question. It is dependent on your business type and the history of your SEO efforts. But I hope that my clues will help you make the right choice.
Let me know if you have any follow-up questions.

[BlueprintMarketing]

@postalmostanything
Subfolders are better then Subdomains in your case use a reverse proxy to rewrite your Subdomains to to subfolders

I recommend Fastly or CloudFlare

I hope this helps.
Tom