Subdomains and SEO - Pros and Cons of Subdomains vs Subdirectories
By Michael Kramer
in Search Engine Optimization Tips, Best Business Practice, Featured Articles - Homepage, Website Optimization Tips
What is a Subdomain?
Every website has a subdomain. In the example http://www.google.com, the subdomain is "www". It's the section just before your main domain, or "top-level" domain, site-ninja.com. By default, each top-level domain has a subdomain of "www". You can replace the www with a different subdomain. One of the best examples I can give of an extremely successful subdomain website is http://santabarbara.craigslist.org. After you go to this page, click to a different city. You will see the website looks exactly the same, but the URL has changed to a different subdomain. Each subdomain website is Search Engine Optimized for that city.
What is a Subdirectory?
Subdirectories, also referred to as Folders, are any extsion of the main domain. For example www.site-ninja.com/blog. The word "blog" is a subdirectory of the main domain.
What Are The 3 Most Common Reasons to Use Subdomains?
- Serving Different Regions - You have multiple geographic regions, and your clients search for your products or services within each region. For example, if you had a pet store and you wanted to open locations in 5 different cities, you would create subdomain websites for each region. http://www.lovingcarepetservices.com would be your main Corporate website, and each city would have a subdomain site, http://chicago.lovingcarepetservices.com, http://denver.lovingcarepetservices.com, etc.
Victory Gyms Subdomain - Better SEO for the San Diego Gym - Franchises - If your company offers franchises, then you help your franchisee by givin them their own website, so they can optimize the content for their region.
- Different Product Lines - Within your company, your products or services vary enough that you want to focus the homepage of each subdomain site on niches within your product line. The reason to do this is, niche websites perform better in search engines and convert more visitors than other websites. For example, let's say you sell most anything to do with kitchens. You sell applicances, silverware, utencils, towels, cookware, etc. If a website visitor is looking for dish towels, and they see kitchen appliances on your homepage, they are not convinced that you can provide a good selection of dish towels. But, if you had a subdomain website called http://dishtowels.everythingkitchen.com, this site would tend to rank higher in the search engines, because the keyword "dishtowels" is in the domain, and therefore associated with every page of the website. Also the website visitor now considers your website an "authority" in dishtowels.
To convert visitors to clients, you 1st develop Trust, then build a relationship, then you can do business. Having a subdomain site with a niche product line is a strong step in building trust with your visitors.
Pros and Cons of Subdirectory: http://www.dogwalking.com/denver
- Pros:
- One monthly hosting fee
- One Content Management System for all regions
- Cons:
- You are personally responsible to collect and maintain content for every region
- People running the regional business for each subdirectory would not be able to modify the website to optimize it for their region.
- Assuming the product for your business is targeted to multiple regions, there usually isn't enough content on the site for any one specific region to let the Search Engines give any one region more importance than a site that was optimzed for only one region. For example, if you have a 50-page website and you only dedicate two pages per region, those two pages are deluted by all the other pages of the website.
Pros and Cons of Subdomain: http://denver.dogwalking.com
- Pros:
- Multiple Websites- Each subdomain is considred a separate website, with each website having it's own Google PageRank. PageRank is Google's way of letting you know how important of each page of your website.
- Total Web Domination - By having multiple websites, you have more opportunity to show up multiple times in a search engine results page, therefore pushing other websites down the page and achieving "Total Web Domination"
- Local Control - The people running the local business can have control over thier own content. For example, in the example of denver.dogwalking.com, they might have a weekly promotion for best pet photo of the week. They would have control over their subdomain website to post a new photo each week.
- Local Optimization of each page - Because the subdomain has the word "Denver", every page of this site is automatically associated with business in Denver.
- Promotion of Main Domain - because each subdomain has the main domain in it's URL, it ties all subdomain sites back to the main domain, which would have more corporate information and promotion of each subdomain.
- Internal and External Linking - Google gives websites better PageRank if there are external websites linking to pages of your website, or links within your website, to other pages of your website. In the case of multiple subdomain websites you would cross-link the sites to help each site get better Ranking in Google. As of the summer of 2011, Google considers all linking between subdomain websites, to the main domain or other subdomains an internal link.
- Cons:
- Additional Hosting Fees - because subdomains are hosted on separate hosting accounts, you will usually encur hosting fees for each subdomain website. Some companies, like SiteNinja CMS, give discounts for multiple hosting accounts.
- Content Moderation - Because you are giving more control to the people managing the regional subdomain website, you have a responsibility to moderate content that is place on those sites, to make sure that content is consistent with your company
Your Tips and Tricks
If you have your own Tips, Tricks or testimonials about subdomains, please leave a comment to this article. I'm all about helping you and others be successful with your websites.
Great information and well presented; it's very understandable.
Thanks!
Great and detailed explanation about subdomains here. But i think subdomains are good if you are on a tight budget.
Spatch Merlin
4am here on the east coast and I just finished adding a few sub domains to my site! Really really great info. Thanks for the free and helpful tips! http://helicam.perspectiveaerials.com
KR
@Cullen: It would be better if your subdomains had the cities you cover and not the county. People don't search by county and that is one of the reasons you are not showing in Google Places for pressure washing in Port Charlotte FL. The other may be that you haven't claimed your Places page.
I think the bottom line is, a sub-domain is treated as a separate website. This makes sense for the examples above such as regions, franchises and different product line.
However, where this does not make sense is for blogs (more often than not). We had our blog on a different domain and moved it to http://thenetstuff.com/blog/. Primary reason being, your blog will usually have content which other sites would want to link to. When they do that, you want the link juice coming to your main domain, thus increasing page rank among other things.
Thanks for informative post.
Sub domains are free and can be used to market on specific search terms easily because the main domain already got some value which effected by overall page rank. I am thinking to create some domains on it and will share my experience with you all soon.
Thanks For The Info it was very informative.i made the decision to do a sub-domain on my web site and did'nt know theseo side of it.Now Thanks To You I Now see that it was a good decision.I name the sub domain http://womenshoes.buyshopandsave.com i'm gonna take a look from a google analytic view to see the difference it makes i will keep you informed.the main domain is http://buyshopandsave.com as another example of what a subdomain looks like...
I've avoided subdomains as it seems to increase the length of the url significantly, especially if you are using parent and child pages. Isn't URL length a SEO factor?
Thank you for this info. I been thinking about adding sub domains. This answered alot of questions I've been looking for when it comes to SEO and sub domains.
Subdomains are free and often are used for SEO to set up separate web directories or catalogs. I am using many subdomains on my own domain.
If sub domains are like stand alone domains with their own hosting, SEO to all of those sub domains would have to be done individually wont they and the SEO done to 1 will not help the others. Whereas SEO done to 1 sub directory will benefit all of them. Is this not true? Sub Domains do not pass link juice to any other sub domain does it?
Great and helpful article. Just got to know www is a sub domain!
I think subdomains is a way to go for me. Actually they are for free even on a shared web hosts.
I have been wrestling with the use of sub-domains for many years now. I am about to start testing out a few new sub-domains such as http://phoenix.laserlightshows.us and http://seattle.laserlightshows.us to see what kind of SEO results I get compared to a sub-directory approach.
So you guys know how good is this for the google pagerank in 2012? I'm currently building a blog on a subdomain http://delgadosyatractivos.mejoresindividuos.com Thank you for this info guys!
A wonderfully informative article indeed. However, google's matt cutts has recommended us using the subdomain for completely different topics and subdirectories for topics within the site's realm.
VJ
Creating subdomeins is not the problem. How do you make the subdomein SEO? Where to put the tags (title, description, keywords, etc.)? In the article where the subdomein is linked at?
Is there somebody with SEO experience on subdomeins?
OOh.. sur la route. our site is http://www.maxol.nl and f.e one of the subdomeins is http://accountant-rotterdam.maxol.nl
The sub I linked to the mainpage. But what about the tags? Does the subdo takes the tags of the main page over?
Great article though dude!
@Max,
The on-page SEO strategies are the exact same - you'll need to focus on the title, h1, content, etc. just like any other page.
We have temporarily decided against the sub-domain route. We may revisit it in the near future. Until then, we'll keep using sub-directories like: http://laserlightshows.us/AZ-arizona/phoenix and http://laserlightshows.us/WA-washington/seattle
Thanks for the explanation. I am thinkng of setting up a range of car repair centres in the U.K and I could not figure how best to promote each county. My current dent repair website is: http://www.autodent-services.co.uk/ but this will be having a bi overhaul with names for counties.
Good explanation. I have redirected my x domain to popular y domain as x.y.in but now my x domain keywords are went back. I am targeting my x domain keywords for x.y.in domains. That keywords are not at all improving. What to do?
I have a subdomain which results better than my root domain. How can I prevent this?
demo.kolaycar.com and www.kolaycar.com
Hi,
Nice article. but i split the site based on region on subdomains. my point both site have same data with different location and and product based on that city.. my site is not pusshing with subdomains while in a normal way without subdomain it gives more result .. isn't it strange.
@Spatch Merlin: I don't understand your remark about the tight budget being a reason for chosing subdomain structure. .The cost of hosting several subdomains was given as a con, negative argument, wasn't it? Can you explain?
That was a good article. Im using started using a subdomain for a forum on my website. Its was probably the best choose. Thanks for sharing.
Great article, but I have doubt of your answer coming to Total web domination.
Here's a more recent answer of Matt.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MswMYk05tk
Thank for the very informative and practical article. Good SEO is like the difference between crawling or running.
Thanks for this valuable information.
I am planning to create sub domains for each city like www.mangalore.coastaldigest.com
www.bangalore.coastaldigest.com
Will it effect the google page ranks. Please suggest me.
Great article about the pro's and con's... what about putting a mis-spelling of keywords as the subdomain, so they are similar but different. is that keyword spam?
What a nice review. i have 5 subdomain in an account.
@MarcBoers: I was wondering the same thing. Subdomains aren't usually hosted in a different place and most shared hosting accounts come with unlimited subdomains. Using that option with something like WordPress multisite, makes creating the subdomains a piece of cake.
Useful information. However, if you need an editor for grammar and spelling, I'll be glad to help.
I want to put a blog in my site but the host won't install Wordpress on his server and is insisting we use a subdomain for the blog. As mentioned above, this is not a good option when the idea of a blog is to increase content and links to my site since Google sees a subdomain as a separate site. Any ideas on what other options I have? Is there a way to make the content in a subdomain appear as belonging to my site?
Thanks!
Thankyou for this Great Info, I have been trying to get info of this for a while,But I think now I know ,I still use both for each has its purpose
Thanks Again
Thanks for the info!
Thanks for the info. Has helped me a a lot in understanding subdomains.
shame about all the crap spam comments lets visit some other rubbish sites
Now, I finally understand the differences. I've halted all development to my website until I understood these basic concepts. Thank you very much!!
@shameabout: We removed all the link spammers from this article. Please refrain from link spamming!
Thanks
Michael
Thanks for the informative post.
Do you know if you had a primary domain of packages.com and a sub domain of for example baliholiday.packages.com if Google would give credit for the key phrase "Bali holiday packages" ?
@Mike: Yes, they do give value to your subdomain. In 2012 Google announced that it would not give as high value to keywords that were used in the domain name or subdomain, only because people were stuffing keywords in the domain only for the purpose of Optimization. That doesn't mean they don't have value, just less value.
Google is giving more value to the words that come after the .com. For example www.packages.com/bali-holiday-packages
I really enjoyed the quality information you offer to your visitors for this blog. I won't hesitate to recommend your web sites to anybody who needs and wants guidance about this topic.
Quite new to Everything Internet, esp. SEO. For the past year or so i have been helping (or trying to!) a friend of mine who owns a Consignment Furniture Store in Scottsdale AZ, Lost And Found Resale. http://lostandfoundresale.com.
Truely enjoyed reading this as her market is seriously "tooth & nail" fighting for placement on Search Engines.
Very exciting information here i will see if the owner wants to try it. Hopefully she will, if so i will report back on how it works for us.
I am about to design a subdomain service where users can create their subdomain i.e. yourname.whatdoesthefoxsay.eu. If interested in collaboration or wanting yourname as subdomain send me a mail to [email protected] I will send you a mail when the betasite is up and running. This way you will get first in line.
Best regards
Pete
Nice article, very well done.
Other than SEO considerations, I wanted to connect several different niche sites, with a common basis but a scattered focus. Geographical location is one consideration, but also the service provided. The one(s)if any, that catch on, then spend more time building those.
I would prefer the potential customers to tell me what need they have rather than make assumptions I know which ones are more relevant.
Each niche site will require a different "theme", and sites are wordpress based.
Would it be more appropriate to use domains, subdomains, or subdirectories?
Thanks in advance.
What about sub-domain sites that are set up really well with an internal linking structure? Can you take a look at this and tell me what you think? http://numerologylove.weebly.com/a-name-and-birth-date-determine-compatibility-in-love-and-life.html
Hi Michael, this is Daniel from http://blog.deebeeaych.com/
In your explanation of what a subdomain is, you mention top-level domains but this should be corrected. The top-level domain is what people commonly refer to as the domain name extension, such as .com or .net.
What you refer to as the top-level domain (which is usually the variable part where people can choose any name that is still available) is actually the 2nd-level domain.