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?
-
We are considering experimenting with this as a Panda solution (worked for hubpages), that's why we don't want to put it in subfolders. We can't move to an entirely new domain, so are considering experimenting with subdomains.
I understand there is quite a bit of disagreement about whether subdomains work or not, but we want to try it.
The content topics are different (beauty vs asthma).
-
Hi Michelle,
Without further information, you're asking us to choose between two bad solutions, so that's a choice we can't make.
What is the piece of information missing that explains why you don't want to put them in subfolders?
How different are the content topics?
If you go with (b), what content is left on the primary domain?
-
Thank you for your feedback. I agree with you, I know subfolders are better. But, if you had to choose one of the above options, what would you choose?
-
I agree.
Zero subdomains here.
-
Hi,
agree 100% with Kane it is also recommended by google for localizations
etc...
It increases domain authority and this is what everyone site owner wants
-
Without knowing anything else, none of the above.
9 times out of 10 I'll recommend the use of subfolders instead.
Is the content dramatically different (babies, acne, race cars, etc.) or is there an overall purpose to the site that makes sense?
To quote myself from some other Q&A answer:
Subdomains are treated slightly differently by Google. Essentially they are seen as less connected to the rest of your content than a subfolder. So, when you get a link to one subdomain, it doesn't count as much towards the other subdomains.
Take wordpress.com as an example:
- surferdude.wordpress.com has little relation to www.wordpress.com
- surferdude.wordpress.com has little relation to skaterguy.wordpress.com
- surferdude.wordpress.com has lots in common with surferdude.wordpress.com/surfboards/***
By using subfolders, you'll retain more value across the single subdomain rather than spreading it among multiple subdomains.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Backlinks to less important subdomain
We have two subdomains on our site: blogs and *www. Our most important and competitive pages are on the www subdomain. I have some pages on the blogs subdomain that have valuable backlinks. Would it be helpful to our SEO efforts for the www subdomain to move and redirect those pages on the blogs subdomain to the www subdomain?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RCF0 -
Noindex / Nofollow multiple reviews pages?
I have well over a hundred pages of reviews (10 per page). I know this is solid content and I'd hate to not be able to leverage it, but I'm running into the issue of having duplicate title tags and H1s on all of the pages. What's the best way to make use of the review content without have those types of issues? Is a noindex / nofollow strategy something I should be considering here for Page 2 and beyond? Thanks! Edit: I did additional digging into pagination strategies and found this terrific article on Moz. I'm thinking it should address my questions regarding review pages as well.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andrew_Mac0 -
How to associate content on one page to another page
Hi all, I would like associate content on "Page A" with "Page B". The content is not the same, but we want to tell Google it should be associated. Is there an easy way to do this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Viewpoints1 -
Anchor text is a url, but not the one I want?
I am currently getting links to my site where the anchor text is, say, domainx.com. However, my website's url is domainy.com - the anchor text is the url of another website. Is this hurting my website in the SERPS, or making my link building look unnatural? The link is on the blog roll of another website, so it has produced hundreds, maybe thousands of copies of this anchor text link. Does that have any impact on my ranking as well?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | redfishking0 -
Novice Question - Can Browsers realistically distinguish words within concatenated strings e.g. text55fun or should one use text-55-fun? What about foreign languages especially more obscure ones like Finnish which Google Translate often miss-translates?
I am attempting to understand what is realistically possible within Google, Yahoo and Bing as they search websites for KeyWords. Technically my understanding is that they should be able to distinguish common words within concatenated strings, although there can be confusion between word boundaries when ambiguity is involved. So in the simple example of text55fun, do search engines actually distinguish text, 55 and fun separately? There are practical processing, databased and algorithm limitations that might turn a technically possible solution into a unrealistic one at a commercial scale. What about more ambiguous strings like stringsstrummingstrongly would that be parsed as string s strummings trongly or strings strummings trongly or strings strumming strongly? Does one need to use dashes or underscores to make it unambiguous to the search engine? My guess is that the engine would recognize the dash or space and better understand the word boundaries yet ignore the dash or underscore from an overall concatenated string perspective. Thanks in advance to whoever can provide any insight to an old coder who is new to this field.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ny600 -
Multiple sitemaps for one site?
Excuse my sitemap ignorance here. I've got a site and it's got a blog in a sub-folder. The blog gets updated frequently, the main site does not. Is it best to; a) Have 2 sitemaps.. one in the root and one in the /blog folder. b) Have 1 sitemap that is regularly updated The reason being, I know there's various plugins that create blog sitemaps on the fly, so that would be much easier than updating the main sitemap every time a change was made. If the answer is 2 sitemaps; Would you stop the root sitemap from detailing the contents of the blog folder or just update it every so often with the contents of the blog folder?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeterAlexLeigh0 -
How to get subdomains to rank well?
Hi All, I am setting up a new site and I want to make use of subdomains to target multiple countries as follows: uk.mydomain.com us.mydomain.com australia.mydomain.com etc. Now i know what you're all going to say, why not use folders as they are more effective. Well I did think of this but decided against it because I would like to make the best of a low competition industry. I want to push my competitors as far down in the SE's as possible and i plan to do this by targeting generic non locational search terms with both sites so I can hog the top 4 spots.as follows: www.mydomain.com www.mydomain.com/keyterm uk.mydomain.com uk.mydomain.com/keyterm-in-the-UK Whats steps can I take to ensure rank passes to my subdomains? Is it better to start the site with folders like www.mydomain.com/us/keyterm and then 301 them to subdomains at a later stage or should i start with the subdomains?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mulith1 -
Redirecting multiple websites to a single website
I've been trying to run several truck accessory affiliate websites for a quite a while now. I've recently decided to combine all of my affiliate websites into a single community website. This way I'll be able to focus all my energy and link building into a single place and build up a single brand. My question is, how many websites do I try to redirect to the new website at a time? Do I need to spread this out? Or is it ok if I move all of my content and websites at a single time? I have around 30 websites that I could move to this new domain. Thanks! Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daenterpri0