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Thank you for shedding more light on the matter. Here are the reasons why our consultant thought that subdomains would be better:

In the case of ICY VEINS the matter is clear, subdomains will be the best of course of action and I will quickly explain why

-          The domain has over 10,000+ pages (my scan is still running looking at 66,000+ addresses already) which put it in a whole new category.  For smaller sites and even local business sites sub directories will always be the better choice

-          Sub Domains will allow you to categorize the different categories of your website.  The sub domains in mind are all relating to the gaming industry so it still makes it relevant to the global theme of the website.

-          Splitting up the different categories into subdomains will allow search engine to better differentiate the areas of your website (see attached image named icy-veins SERP – Sitelink.png).  At the moment Google do not properly categorize your areas of your website and uses your most popular visited areas as the given site links in the search engine results page)

-          However noting that you already have the sub directory /heartstone  a .htaccess 301 redirect for that whole directory will have to be set in place for any current.  This will ensure that any inbound links from other sites will be automatically redirected to the correct sub domain and index page.  Failing to implement the redirect will cause that the correct Page Authority and Domain Authority not to carry over to the sub domain. Technically heartstone.icy-veins.com and icy-veins.com is to separate domains according to the DNS that is why it is important to ensure that the redirects is in place to carry over any “seo juice” that the old directory had.

-          Sub domains enhances the user experience of your visitors by keeping to separate themes and topics.  This will have a positive impact on your bounce rate (which is currently sitting at 38% for the last 30 days) and better funnelling for goal conversions (i.e. donate | newsletter signup | advertise on our website

-          Essentially you are focusing on different products for the same brand

In the  end of the day it comes down to your personal preference although sub domains will be a better choice to ensure that your different products are split up and reflects better with the search engine results pages.

Thank you Dean and Caitlin! So, I guess the next step would be to revert the change and switch to directories (using 301-redirects from the subdomains), right?

Hello everyone,

I operate a website called Icy Veins (www.icy-veins.com), which gives gaming advice for World of Warcraft and Hearthstone, two titles from Blizzard Entertainment. Up until recently, we had articles for both games on the main subdomain (www.icy-veins.com), without a directory structure. The articles for World of Warcraft ended in -wow and those for Hearthstone ended in -hearthstone and that was it.

We are planning to cover more games from Blizzard entertainment soon, so we hired a SEO consultant to figure out whether we should use directories (www.icy-veins.com/wow/, www.icy-veins.com/hearthstone/, etc.) or subdomains (www.icy-veins.com, wow.icy-veins.com, hearthstone.icy-veins.com). For a number of reason, the consultant was adamant that subdomains was the way to go.

So, I implemented subdomains and I have 301-redirects from all the old URLs to the new ones, and after 2 weeks, the amount of search traffic we get has been slowly decreasing, as the new URLs were getting index. Now, we are getting about 20%-25% less search traffic. For example, the week before the subdomains went live we received 900,000 visits from search engines (11-17 May). This week, we only received 700,000 visits.

All our new URLs are indexed, but they rank slightly lower than the old URLs used to, so I was wondering if this was something that was to be expected and that will improve in time or if I should just go for subdomains.

Thank you in advance.