Subdomains:
A subdomain looks like this: ducks.birdies.com
Consider subdomains only if your site is enormous (thousands of pages) and you have the time to build links for the subdomain, as it will be considered a separate site by search engines.
Subdomains, if grown with content and outside links, as if they were separate sites, can link to and increase the rankings of your primary domain.
So why use subdomains instead of just buying a whole new url? For one thing you might want to increase brand recognition between your subdomain and your primary domain. Your subdomain will carry the brand value you’ve developed for your url.
Here’s an example given by Rob Sullivan on when he used subdomains:
I recently consulted with a large legal website and they felt that they weren’t getting the traffic or exposure they should. Upon my analysis, I determined that this site, while organized into subfolders, was actually causing itself harm in the search engines. This is because there was so much information available on the site on a variety of topics that the engines were having problems categorizing it.So we devised a subdomain strategy that would help focus certain areas of the site to help them compete individually with their competitors.
Hot topics such as Bankrupcty and Divorce became their own subdomains because a) there was sufficient content (tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of pages) to support the subdomains and b) because they are highly searched for topics.
Through this strategy they created various subdomains and then used the .htaccess 301 rewrite rules to make it appear that the content had moved.
Subfolders:
A subfolder looks like this: birdies.com/ducks
The vast majority of site builders will be better off sticking with subfolders for organizing their content.
How you organize your site and name your subfolders of course is part of your overall SEM strategy.
Rand Fishkin says it well in his Beginners Guide to SEM:
The URL of a document should ideally be as descriptive and brief as possible. If, for example, your site’s structure has several levels of files and navigation, the URL should reflect this with folders and subfolders. Individual pages’ URLs should also be descriptive without being overly lengthy, so that a visitor who sees only the URL could have a good idea of what to expect on the page.
Summary:
If you’re new at SEM marketing, or if your site has fewer than 10,000 pages then the chances are good that you’ll find little SEM benefit from subdomains and should instead concentrate on lining up your site’s structure and its folder-names with your overall site keyword strategy.
More subfolder vs. subdomain resources:
URL and Subfolder strategy (from Rand Fishkin)
Question :: Are Subdomains better than Subdirectories? (from Rob Sullivan)
Subdomains – What are the SEO benefits? (from Joe Balestrino)
Subdomains versus subdirectories (Webmaster World thread)
Will Subdomains Help With SEO? (Search Engine Watch thread) ![[]](http://www.searchmarketingstandard.com/wp-content/themes/sms/images/entry-end.gif)
Would ducks.birdies.com compete with swans.birdies.com?
What about birdies.com/ducks and birdies.com/swans?
Subdomains are looked at as completly seperate sites in the search engines and your sub folders are going to count for your overall URL.
I normally use subdomains for load balancing.
An interesting thing I have seen are people who buy one hosting account and set up multiple sub domains on their account. They use this for adsense and I have seen people make hundres of thousands doing this.
Elena – I’m going to do a post on that today… thank you for your question!
Joe – what affect did the subdomains have on making those enormous stacks of cash? In other words… would they have made as much in adsense if they had simply created different sites?
It was very cheap for them to do hundreds of subdomains rather then buying hosting accounts and domains for hundreds of sites. So you have to consider your cost per potential revenue here. By putting up the sub domains this person saved tons of money and his ROI was significant.
Thanks very much, Garrett.
I am very interested in this topic, as my company site had two subdomains, and all three “sites” were competing with one another (to use our earlier example: birdies.com, swans.birdies.com, and ducks.birdies.com)
Garrett,
What I wrote about subdomains vs subfolders applies primarily to blackhat – I haven’t even considered a whitehat situation with, for example, a corporate site when writing that post. What you’re considering here is very interesting but it’s not what I meant initially.
This just shows that you’re completely unfamiliar with blackhat tactics. When you use the blackhat business model you build tons of sites, be it for AdSense of for affiliate stuff. By saying “tons” I mean thousands of sites – imagine how much it would cost to use proper domains for each of these sites. Another tactic is to use third party hosting as in parasite hosting on authority domains, free hosting, etc. Not all blackhats stick to subdomains – some do actually buy separate domains for each site. Anyway, here’s the idea in general. Hope I made myself clear enough.
Hi,
This is really nice article, but i like to know about sub sub folder like
sub.subdomain.domain.com – can it worth or how its useful, i have seen some of sites have excellent ranking with sub sub domain.
Looking for your valuable inputs in the same.
Many webmasters prefer subdomains but I personally see no difference, I care only about content and links.
Anyone know of a free utility or web script that would search a subdomain?
Hello
Subdomains form SEO point of view are very helpful – btw you get keyword in url. But without proper caution you can make more damage than gain from their implementation.
When deciding for subdomains you need to be very carefull about subdomain & domain cross linking.
Also the same IP address of subdomain and main domain is very suspicious to search engine crawlers.
The sad part is when your main domain gets for instance in sandbox or worse get banned whole value of subdomain disappears.
Hope this advice will help somebody
Regards
Subdomains also have the advantage of breaking up similar but different topics. An example:
A used car site. The main domain is my main site. It is for used cars and truck. This is where my brand (or at least site name) recognition comes in. All keywords are based around manufacturers and models of cars and trucks
Subdomain 1: RVs I want to still capitalize on my main sites brand but I need a new set of keywords. I do not want to dilute the keywords on my main site. This site will emphisize a different set of manufacturers and models and will rank for them.
Subdomain 2: boats ETC
Doing this I the correct keywords on each subdomain while still holding all the sites together from a user prospective.
Anyone know of a free utility or web script that would search a subdomain ?
Many webmasters prefer subdomains but I personally see no difference, I care only about content and links.
This is really nice article, but i like to know about sub sub folder like
sub.subdomain.domain.com – can it worth or how its useful, i have seen some of sites have excellent ranking with sub sub domain
I’m thinking a subdomain would be really good if you had multiple levels on your site (based on your users) and you were going to have similar subfolder structures for each level.
So if you had normal visitors, members, and staff – and you wanted to have a calendar for them to use in a calendar subfolder, it would probably be easier to use subdomains so then you could have:
yourdomain.com/calendar
staff.yourdomain.com/calendar/
members.yourdomain.com/calendar/
Right?
Many webmasters prefer subdomains but I personally see no difference, I care only about content and links.
Many webmasters prefer subdomains but I personally see no difference, I care only about content and links.
it can’t help in link exchange , they give u link from same ip . but subdirectory help to increase content in your site and bring visitor to your site and link from home page as internal link help you to increase keyword page rank
Very interesting indeed. I have to say though, I am not sure that you need 10,000′s of pages to consider sub domains. I think there are times when clear structuring and branding requires sub domains before that level. I for example run 3 sub domains each has about 2000 pages. Reason this is needed is that the topics are totally different and if I were to drop them all as sub directories the back links would be totally different.
Its a very tough dicision to make though. Take advice if you are not sure.
This is great! It sure clears things up for me. I think it’s more of an issue of structuring and branding. An example would be related topics or keyword, but different physically products. It would be hard to group everything into main domain.
I think I agree with ADAC about branding and keyword dilution concept. I was planning myself for creating subdomains for unrelated themed website with the same brand. Lets see how it goes.
Shahryar’s point is also interesting that I think can make website maintenance and use better.
BTW its funny how many have been spamming the comments just to add a keyboard backlink when they actually dont realise that all links are nofollow lol
I completely agree with the writer of this post. If sub folders can not be made properly then a problem may crop up. So, if you do not have much knowledge regarding this, better consult with the experienced people of this field.
Great information! I was hoping it worked slightly different so that I could get keywords in the subdomain without competing against my main domain.
Looks like I either need a different solution, or need A LOT more content.
thanks!
Dr. Jeff
What is a good structure for a bookmarking website ? I have just run a bookmarking website using Hotaru and need a blog (wp preferred) . should I sun it on sub domain or sub folder ?
Thanx
Awesome, I generally use sub domain to concentrate one verticals in that, this will help me in seo .
Thanks for sharing the information about sub-domain vs sub folder.
Hi Garrett,
I think your advice is really good.
But I don’t think this comes down to having ten thousands of pages on your main site in order to use a sub-domain.
A sub-folder is part of the main domain and a sub-domain can be thought as a category for the main domain name.
It doesn’t gets any simpler than that.
Sergio
for me, i like to choose subdomain over subfolder even though my web is not big enough, i like subdomain because it makes me focus to another certain title or keyword..
Hi Garrett,
Its a very good article to understand the difference between sub domain and sub folders.
Thank you for sharing,
Thanks,
Rick.
Thanks for sharing! I like subdomain than subfolder, but i think using subfolder will be good for normal web.
I have a small services business that I am looking to take to another city. The site gets some good keywords in the city I am in (NYC), but I am looking to start a branch in another city. What is the best way to do this without changing the NYC site at all since I dont want it to be one of those sites that just lists a bunch of different cities. Each city should seem like it is local to that city, but at the same time we want to brand the company as a whole. Any idea of how to best do that in regards to design and subdomains etc?
Thanks for the great and helpful article. I will try to apply subdomains for the member profiles in my website. Hope it would make much more sense for the clients to reach to the profiles.
Thanks Very much for this article. Earlier I was thinking to create different subdomains for my website but after reading this article, I feel that I will keep my folder structure intact.