The URL Inside

[creativedepartment]

Howdy SEO'ers,

I have a quick question for the SEO gurus out there.

When constructing "better" search friendly URLs would one of these be better than the other?

Example 1:

http://Domain.com/Category/Sub-Category/Product-name

Example 2:

http://Category.Domain.com/Sub-Category/Product-name

In this example the category could be phones and the sub-category brands of phones.

Is either one of these URLs "better" than the other in terms of ranking?

Thanks!

I'll hang-up and listen to your answer.

Jonathan

[gfiorelli1]

Mystripping the category is "safer", because I've seen so many eCommerce that assign a product to more then 1 category. This causes at least 2 urls with the same content... Duplication with all the risks dupes have for a site health.

[RyanKent]

I agree with Gianluca and for the reasons he provided.

Alan, I could not get the URL link you shared to work, but it seems Matt is directly referring to the crawling and indexing of the page, not the ranking.

The ranking of the page has much greater potential on an established site with DA rather then on a sub-domain which does not have the DA of the main site.

The only part of Gianluca's advice which seems debatable is whether or not to include the category in the URL. I am sure you will find solid SEO reasons to support both methods.

[irvingw]

Gianluca is absolutely correct. Example one (main site) is much better. Subdomains were used by spammers many years ago and are no longer a good strategy.

For every subdomain you make for each product you're basically creating a separate site too which needs to be put into GWMT seperately, so that gets a little crazy. It's just not a good strategy, even when someone wants to create a blog only for their site I tell them to put it under the main domain for PR and Google webmster compliance reasons, and you're talking about creating dozens of subdomains. There is only downside to doing it that way.

Good luck

[AlanMosley]

I would have to disagree

Matt Cutts December 10, 2007 at 10:48 am

<dd class="comment byuser comment-author-matt-cutts bypostauthor even thread-even depth-1">

“Which one is to be expected to be indexed and show on Google first; subdomain or subdirectory?”

Harith, to the best of my knowledge neither one has an advantage for crawling/indexing first.

</dd>

OK its old, but i could not find any metion after that date.
What i think is important is if the appear to be diffrenct sites, this can be the same for subdirectories

[gfiorelli1]

Discard the subdomain option, because it's a link building killer. A subdomain is an independent site for the search engine respect the main domain, therefore you would have to do X link building campaign for the X category of product you have. Then all the link gained by a subdomain would not have ranking value for the others, because they a different sites. Therefore, for categories, the best is: www.domain.com/category. For the product page the best is always to strip the categories and subcategories from the URL: www.domain.com/product. This diminishes a lot the risk of duplication content, that can appear when you assign a product to more than category or subcategory.

[AlanMosley]

This question has been asked many times, and i would say that they are the same if linked well. i would cross link them so that they do not look like seperate sites.