Sphinn - Subdomains or Subfolders : Which are Better for SEO?

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Subdomains or Subfolders : Which are Better for SEO?

Went Hot: May 6, 2008 - 9:08 am
Posted By: annie7 160 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.searchenginejournal.com)
Category: SEO

Subdomains or Subfolders? What’s better for a blog/forum/etc: a subdomain (eg. http://jobs.searchenginejournal.com/) or subfolder (eg. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/)?

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10 Comments

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from lindop 160 days ago #

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I've mainly used subfolders for ecommerce clients. I've got nothing against subdomains - in fact you can sometimes get another slot in the SERPs with 2 subfolders and 1 subdomain... try "amazon" or "bbc"... they dominate the top of the fold.

I'd be really interested to hear from anyone who has used subdomains heavily.

from Vingold 160 days ago #

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Not that I do this, but I like subdomains for building manufactured links, and I like subfolders for everything else.

I think you get more link weight back from a subdomain. For instance services.performancing.com gets oodles of links back from the main blog site of performancing.com.

I imagine their rankings for their services page would be a lot less if the links from the main site pointed to a subfolder instead of a sub-domain.

from FLSEO 160 days ago #

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Personally?

I hardly ever use sub domains ... but after reviewing Matt Cutts article ... I might in some cases ... I was under the (possibly inaccurate) impression that subdomains were discounted for page rank due to past subdomain abuses ...

from jboeckman 160 days ago #

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I agree with Vingold, use subdomains if you have separate topics to create semi unique content. This will help you to estabilsh all content on that subdomain with a particular theme and you can also use the link juice across your domains.

I disagree in the fact that getting all of your links from one site will create great success, especially because that one site is probably on the same IP.

from Drupal 160 days ago #

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I have to disagree with this article, unfortunately. Google did announce it will treat subdomains like subfolders to combat the spam techniques and ranking effects of, say, ebay subdomains as commented above.

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/015621.html

However, I haven't seen this in practice yet, I still see multiple subdomains appearing from ebay for certain searches. Perhaps it's a rollout.

Now, if subdomains and subfolders are treated the same, then link juice *should* also flow between them.

One benefit of subfolders, though, is you don't have to add and verify them separately in Google Webmaster Tools - which, if you have a lot of subdomains (country/language/product etc) can save you a bit of time.

from Drupal 160 days ago #

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Desphinn = not working for me.

from lindop 160 days ago #

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Yes but what Google says and what it does can be quite different sometimes - Google should only allow max. 2 results from a domain on the SERPs but subdomains can increase this limit. Perhaps they're viewed identically with regards to link popularity, but as this shows there is still *something* that seperates them backstage at Google.

from Drupal 160 days ago #

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Re: Comments on SEJ, I notice when I uncheck the "email me comments" box, comments go through otherwise they don't. Must be a cookie problem.

from hugoguzman 160 days ago #

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Well put, Drupal! Matt's blog post is a good starting point as is the seroundtable piece, but the bottom line is that either method works just fine.

Neither one hinders SEO in any signficant way.

from annie7 159 days ago #

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@Linda: Loren is working on the comment issue at SEJ. Many thanks for your feedback!

(and copy-pasting from the SEJ comment - I guess, I had to answer in both the places)

Google (Matt) gave a vague explanation as for that change:

"This change doesn’t apply across the board; if a particular domain is really relevant, we may still return several results from that domain."

This "high relevance" may apply to any case.

But honestly, I tend to see these slight changes take place; and I guess G will be getting even better at telling which subdomains deserve a separate position in SERPs and which don't. (So if you aim at more than one SERP position, you'll need several domains - subdomains won't help a lot; so from this perspective, there's no point in subdomains).

Besides (@Linda), by 'treating subdomains as subfolders' the post you are citing means rankings, and not link juice. So, no, not completely the same.

So the main question is, what's better for link juice. On the one hand, subdirectories grow the link authority of the domain. On the other hand, like Vinny said, a domain is able to give more link weight to a subdomain than to a subfolder:

"I think you get more link weight back from a subdomain. For instance services.performancing.com gets oodles of links back from the main blog site of performancing.com. I imagine their rankings for their services page would be a lot less if the links from the main site pointed to a subfolder instead of a sub-domain."

So what's better from the linking point of view?