Should subdomains be avoided for brand new websites?
-
When creating a brand new website, will setting it up as a subdomain provide ranking benefits? I understand that if it's an existing domain, it's better to use a subfolder because a subdomain is treated as a different domain. But is there any reason not to start a website with the keyword in the subdomain?
For example:
The SERP's are dominated by websites which contain some variation of the head term, but the disadvantage of doing a similar this is your website looks very similar.
Thanks!
-
To add to the other responses, I can see reason why you might want to not use your keyword in a sub domain. If you do, it means that everytime you give you web address out to someone you have to use it!
Depending on your keyword, this could be a nightmare! I'm not sure it'll do your "brand" many benefits either.
What happens if you go down this route and decide to change your target keyword, or your keyword is no longer relevant to you business (things change!). Do you build a new site hosted on the subdomain for each keyword? (Things could become silly if you take this too far!)
A simple "www" or nothing has become an easy to remember convention.
-
Google is starting to see subdomains as internal pages to the root domain. Hence the value of subdomains have greatly diminished. More info here - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.au/2011/08/reorganizing-internal-vs-external.html
So if you are looking to target multiple keywords, it would be best to create a sound site structure that includes optimised content and URLs for your targeted keywords.When developing your internal linking structure, make sure these pages also link to both the home page and category page.
-
Hi Jon,
If you are just trying to create a page on your website about "keyword" there is no reason you should be using a subdomain. Every piece of content on your site should be on the root domain.
You will get no ranking benefits from a subdomain over a subfolder. That being said if you create the best content out there you can rank anything, but this will set you back.
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
-
SEO on dynamic website
Hi. I am hoping you can advise. I have a client in one of my training groups and their site is a golf booking engine where all pages are dynamically created based on parameters used in their website search. They want to know what is the best thing to do for SEO. They have some landing pages that Google can see but there is only a small bit of text at the top and the rest of the page is dynamically created. I have advised that they should create landing pages for each of their locations and clubs and use canonicals to handle what Google indexes.Is this the right advice or should they noindex? Thanks S
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bedynamic0 -
Redirecting Old Websites to New Websites
Hi Everyone, We are about to take down a number of websites in favour of a new singular B2B hub and would be looking to redirect all of these sites to the new home. For SEO purposes, what would be the best way to do this? Due to the difference in setups and scale of the site, it would be difficult to correctly match up each page to page between the sites for individual 301 redirects. Could someone advise on the best plan of action? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chbiz0 -
How to avoid adult traffic to site?
A client of ours is increasingly getting a lot of adult traffic to their site, where they show up only for adult searches and not at all for relevant searches. How can we stop Google associating their site with adult content? Here's a blog example, giving advice to parents on girls and body image issues: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/blog/girls-and-body-image keywords driving traffic to this page are all around images for 'young nude girls' etc.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MediaCause0 -
'?q=:new&sort=new' URL parameters help...
Hey guys, I have these types of URLs being crawled and picked up on by MOZ but they are not visible to my users. The URLs are all 'hidden' from users as they are basically category pages that have no stock, however MOZ is crawling them and I dont understand how they are getting picked up as 'duplicate content'. Anyone have any info on this? http://www.example.ch/de/example/marken/brand/make-up/c/Cat_Perso_Brand_3?q=:new&sort=new Even if I understood the technicality behind it then I could try and fix it if need be. Thanks Guys Kay
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eLab_London0 -
Problem with Google finding our website
We have an issue with Google finding our website: (URL removed) When we google "(keyword removed)" in google.com.au, our website doesn't come up anywhere. This is despite inserting the suitable title tag and onsite copy for SEO. We found this strange, and thought we'd investigate further. We decided to just google the website URL in google.com.au, to see if it was being properly found. Our site appeared at the top but with this description: A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more. We also can see that the incorrect title tag is appearing. From this, we assumed that there must be an issue with the robot.txt file. We decided to put a new robot.txt file up: (URL removed) This hasn't solved the problem though and we still have the same issue. If someone could get to the bottom of this for us, we would be most appreciative. We are thinking that there may possibly be another robot.txt file that we can't find that is causing issues, or something else we're not sure of! We want to get to the bottom of it so that the site can be appropriately found. Any help here would be most appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavo0 -
Problems with a website-help
Soooooo, I did a crawl report on this site : www.greatwesternflooring.com and this was what was on the report. This is a dnn site. I'm guessing the site has a redirect loop given the http status code. Can anyone help me with a fix. (the developers have said there is no redirect on the site......clearly there is....) | http://www.greatwesternflooring.com/ | 2015-01-07T21:32:25Z | 609 : Redirect to already-visited URL received for page request. | Error attempting to request page; see title for details. | 302 | http://www.greatwesternflooring.com | <colgroup><col width="319"> <col width="144"> <col width="378"> <col span="39" width="64"></colgroup>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Britewave
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |0 -
Subdomain or subfolder for each country
Hi all I have a great .com domain but the cctlds are not available so I plan on using the .com for all the countries and languages. What is the best approach for SEO: subdomains like wikipedia does (de.greatdomain.com) or subfolders (greatdomain.com/de)? I know this question comes up frequently on other websites but I would like to hear the Moz forum.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndersDK0 -
Subdomain SEO question (php script on domain + wordpress on subdomain)
Hi Moz fellows, I am doing my first website which is entirely .php scripted. But I would like to have a wordpress blog to create content and blog posts, while the .php side of the website is more for sales pages and user generated listings.The only way to do this is to install wordpress on a subdomain "blog.website.com" QUESTION: If all my keywords targeted content is on the subdomain's Wordpress blog, but all my guest blogging efforts link to my main website, which one will rank? The subdomain or the domain? I need the domain to rank well as it is a Fiverr-like script, so if tons of people land on my "blog.website.com" subdomain, they will not convert into users... Let me know if you have experience with such a scenario, and thank you all in advance for your help! -Marc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marcandre0