Subdomain blog vs. subfolder blog in 2013.
-
Having read this ( http://www.seomoz.org/q/blog-on-a-subdomain-vs-subfolder ) & countless of blog posts on never to put your blog on a domain because a subdomain is treated as a different site & your blog traffic won't help with your main sites authority. I've always pushed for subfolder blogs.
However I've been seeing a lot of blogs now and days saying that Google is now treating subdomains as the same site as your main site.
ETC...
What does everyone think? Is it acceptable to have a blog in a subdomain in 2013?
Thanks!
-
Have to agree with Takeshi. In my experience, even still in 2013, having a blog on a subdomain gives you all of the disadvantages of it being a separate site while achieving none of the advantages.
If the blog's topics are directly related to the primary topics of the website itself, put it in a subdirectory - save yourself all kinds of hassle while letting your main site authority help your blog, and vice versa.
Paul
[Updated to note: those two articles you mention are referring to very specific elements of subdomains and subdirectories. Namely that geo-targeting is equally effective whether you're using a subdomain or subdirectory, that specifically within Webmaster Tools, links between subdomains and primary domains will be considered internal for reporting purposes, and that subdomains are no longer considered "seperate" sites when it comes to trying to get your site/subdomain to show multiple times in a SERP.. These should in no way be considered general claims that subdomains and subdirectories perform similarly in all other aspects]
-
In my experience, Google still treats subdomains as separate sites in many respects (I work for a large ecommerce site with 30 different subdomains). It's also how large webhosts like wordpress.com & tumblr.com can get away with having so many people creating poor content without being penalized-- each subdomain is treated as a separate site.
If you want your site to get SEO benefit from your blog (and vice versa), I would stick to subdirectories. Why take the chance on a subdomain? They certainly don't provide any benefits above and beyond a subdirectory.
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
-
Ecommerce store on subdomain - danger of keyword cannibalization?
Hi all, Scenario: Ecommerce website selling a food product has their store on a subdomain (store.website.com). A GOOD chunk of the URLs - primarily parameters - are blocked in Robots.txt. When I search for the products, the main domain ranks almost exclusively, while the store only ranks on deeper SERPs (several pages deep). In the end, only one variation of the product is listed on the main domain (ex: Original Flavor 1oz 24 count), while the store itself obviously has all of them (most of which are blocked by Robots.txt). Can anyone shed a little bit of insight into best practices here? The platform for the store is Shopify if that helps. My suggestion at this point is to recommend they all crawling in the subdomain Robots.txt and canonicalize the parameter pages. As for keywords, my main concern is cannibalization, or rather forcing visitors to take extra steps to get to the store on the subdomain because hardly any of the subdomain pages rank. In a perfect world, they'd have everything on their main domain and no silly subdomain. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alces0 -
Effect on SEO with growing number of subdomains
Since a few days I'm having some concernes on our website structure regarding SEO. Since I can't find similar cases I'm curious if the Moz community maybe have a few thoughts on the issue I'm facing The situation is as follow: For every new client our company (hosting) receives through www.example.com a new subdomain is created. This subdomain is an backup of the original website of the client and is very much irrelevant to our business. Google can also crawl these subdomains and index them. Productvariant 1: clientxxx1.productX.example.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Steven87
Productvariant 2: clientxxx1.productY.example.com
Productvariant 3: cleintxx10.productZ.example.com So I think above situation is far from ideal and I think it can cause problems. The problems we could be facing where Im thinking of are: no control over content (spam, low quality, bad optimised pages) duplicate sites (the backup on our subdomain and the original one of the client) impossible to make/manage a property for each subdomain in search console. Huge amount of subdomains which could influence crawl/indexation by Google. Maybe there are some more issues we could face where I didn't think of? The most common fix would be to use an other domain for the backups like client1.host-example.com and prevent Google from crawling it. This way www.example.com wouldn't be affected. So my questions basically are: 1. How much will this influence rankings for www.example.com
2. Are there any similar cases and what effect did it have on rankings/crawl/indexation when it got fixed / didn't got fixed?0 -
The Value of Backlinks - Blog posts
Alright, So I'm trying to understand the value of a backlink from a blogger/site owner. Now, as I know, (let's use fashion industry), there are thousands of fashion bloggers with good metrics... Domain Authority 40+ Page Authority 40+ etc. etc. for their home page. And there are THOUSANDS of fashion bloggers that link back to ecommerce sites (backlinks). My question is, is there really much of a value with these backlinks? Sure, the domain authority and page authority is high ( for the given example), BUT wouldn't the page authority automatically be a 1 for a "post" ? Le'ts say one blogger writes a new blog for July 14th and dedicates that blog post about the awesome shoes they have and it links back to an ecommerce site; well, what impact does that make in regards to SEO? And if it does, how long would that take? The biggest issue I see is the ROI. You link build, you get links - and then ....you wait. Or you hope that you'll move up in rankings, but yet they can take months for it to even move the needle. Especially the fact that if it's not a HOME PAGE link...there isn't that "much" of a boost compared to an internal page? So then the NEXT question I have too, wouldn't influencer outreach be the same as far as getting a PBN link, creating web 2.0's, etc.? Let's think about it. You're outreaching to someone so you can benefit something back. It's all unnatural at the end of the day. Would love to discuss. So in summary 1 - Value of influencer outreach links - especially if the post is a brand new content piece.. (page authority being automatically 1) 2- - What exactly IS white hat when really any type of link building is mimicking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggpaul5620 -
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 -
What is better for web ranking? A domain or subdomain?
I realise that often it is better put content in a subfolder rather than a subdomain, but I have another question that I cannot seem to find the answer to. Is there any ranking benefit to having a site on a .co.uk or .com domain rather than on a subdomain? I'm guessing that the subdomain might benefit from other content on the domain it's hosted on, but are subdomains weighted down in any way in the search results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Subdomains and Forwarding Domains
Will someone who has experience chime in on these two issues below: Do sub-domain links which link back to the main site count as a new link from a new site; or would they be considered more of an internal link? Basically, would a sub-domain link to the main site be like a link from a unique website, or treated like any other internal link on the main site? I am speaking in terms of link juice. Should we 301 sub-domains to the main site internally? Thank you, we really appreciate any input you have!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DJ1230 -
Canonical vs noindex for blog tags
Our blog started to user tags & I know this is bad for Panda, but our product team wants use them for user experience. Should we canonizalize these tags to the original blog URL or noindex them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Separate IP Address for Blog
Our developers are recommending we sign up for a cloud based LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, & PHP) server to install 3<sup>rd</sup> party software (Wordpress). They said "the blog will be on a separate IP address and potentially can have some impact with SEM/SEO." Can anyone expand on what impact this might have versus having it on the same IP?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pbhatt0