SubDomain vs. SubFolder
-
I know this subject has been discussed many, many times before. But it is now 2013, and Google continues to tweak and change their algo to build upon the best delivered results for users.
So the questions are:
Does Google still treat subdomains as a completely separate and unique domain from the root?
If so, is it a good SEO strategy to split up, when it fits, a website into subdomains with links pointing back to the root or main domain?
As a company we have several subdomains with some of our categories. For example our main site is www.iboats.com. This site has all our boat products. But we set up subdomains several years ago for the following:
And we have our fourms as a subdomain: forums.iboats.com
Splitting them out were originally done for SEO reasons, but now is more for better managing our main categories.
It appears that Google is treating our subdomains as part of our main root domain anyway, so I don't see the SEO value anymore. If we were to move the subdomains into subfolders of the root, I'm wondering if we might see a boost in SEO value having more pages within the main website?
I'd be interested in everyone's thoughts on this subject.
-
Are there no opinions on this topic?
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Rel=Canonical Vs. 301 for blog articles
Over the last few years, my company has acquired numerous different companies -- some of which were acquired before that. Some of the products acquired were living on their previous company's parent site vs. having their own site dedicated to the product. The decision has been made that each product will have their own site moving forward. Since the product pages, blog articles and resource center landing pages (ex. whitepapers LPs) were living on the parent site, I'm struggling with the decision to 301 vs. rel=canonical those pages (with the new site being self canonicaled). I'm leaning toward take-down and 301 since rel=canonicals are simply suggestions to Google and a new domain can get all the help it can to start ranking. Are there any cons to doing so?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mfcb0 -
Structured data: Product vs auto rental schema?
Hi mozzers, If you are rental company, is it useful to add both the product and auto rental schemas or auto rental schema on its own should just be enough? Finally, on the auto rental schema, you have to add an address. Could we just add a city instead of an entire address and avoid receiving a warning message on the strutured data testing tool? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ty19860 -
Blog - subdomain vs. subfolderq
Hi everyone I work on an ecommerce site and I'm trying to get more content together for the site & blog. The development team want to put the blog we have on a subdomain of our site, my question is - what is better for SEO Subfolder vs. subdomain I've read a couple of articles to say subfolder is better and a subdomain needs a lot of management to build up authority itself? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
International Subdomain Headache
My client set up a separate domain for their international clients, then set up separate subdomains for each country where they're active (so, for example, the original site is xx.com and the global is xxworldwide.com, with subdomains like mx.xxxworldwide.com). They auto-translated a large amount of content and put the translations on those international sites. The idea was to draw in native speakers. Now, I don't think this is a great practice, obviously, and I'm worried that it could hurt their original site (the xxx.com in the example above). My concern is that Google will see through the translated text, since it was handled with Google Translate, and penalize both sites. I don't think the canonical tag applies here, since Google recommends a no-follow for autotranslated text, but I've also never dealt with this type of situation before. Anyways, if you made it through all of that, congratulations. My question is whether xxx.com is getting any negative effects other than a potential loss of link juice -- and whether there's any legitimate way to present auto-translated text with a few minor changes without incurring a penalty.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ask44435230 -
Hreflang in vs. sitemap?
Hi all, I decided to identify alternate language pages of my site via sitemap to save our development team some time. I also like the idea of having leaner markup. However, my site has many alternate language and country page variations, so after creating a sitemap that includes mostly tier 1 and tier 2 level URLs, i now have a sitemap file that's 17mb. I did a couple google searches to see is sitemap file size can ever be an issue and found a discussion or two that suggested keeping the size small and a really old article that recommended keeping it < 10mb. Does the sitemap file size matter? GWT has verified the sitemap and appears to be indexing the URLs fine. Are there any particular benefits to specifying alternate versions of a URL in vs. sitemap? Thanks, -Eugene
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eugene_bgb0 -
Subdomain vs root which is better for SEO
We run a network of sites that we are considering consolidating into one main site with multiple categories. Which would be better having each of the "topics / site" reside in subdomains or as a sub-folder off of the root? Pros and cons of each would be great. Thanks, TR
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DisMedia0 -
Wordpress Tags vs. Categories(looking to restructure things)
Just looking for some advice on this topic. I know it's much debated but it seems the consensus is that having some broad categories and more defined tags is optimal. The issue with my site is that it is very broad in nature. We're profiling and interviewing all types of careers. The site is www.jobshadow.com for reference. Up until now I haven't used Wordpress Tags at all. I've just been using categories(i.e. 9-5 type jobs, salaried jobs, hourly jobs, jobs in medicine, etc). I've probably got way too many categories. They are being counted as links on every post page which pushes me way overboard on links per page. -Just curious if anyone has any thoughts on best practices for my site. -Also, none of the categories themselves are really pulling in any SEO traffic so switching those wouldn't be a big deal. Just looking for the best way to help users browse the site and the growing number of content. And rom what I hear Tags can pull in some random/long tail traffic pretty easily if done right. Look forward to hearing your thoughts. Thanks for the help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | astahl110 -
Better to have one subdomain or multiple subdomains?
We have quite a bit of content we are considering subdomaining. There are about 13 topic centers that could deserve their own subdomain, but there are about 2000 original articles that we also want to subdomain. We are considering a) putting the 13 centers (i.e. babies.domain.com, acne.domain.com, etc) and the 3000 articles (on a variety of topics) on one subdomain b) putting the 13 centers on their own subdomain and the remaining 3000 articles on their own subdomain as well (14 subdomains total) What do you think is the best solution and why?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0