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What’s better Sub-domains or Folders?
By Gary Thomas | July 10, 2007
I know this is an on going debate among webmasters. However, I will be looking strictly from an SEO point of view.
When webmaster first started using sub-domains this was a great idea to help separate departments in your business. An example would be if I sold gadgets and sub gadgets. I would have the following domain names:
gadgets.mycompany.com
sub-gadgets.mycompany.com
This was great, especially to help boost the weight in the overall algorithm. This allowed webmaster to get their site recognized quicker. Then SEO experts started using Spammy techniques, which alerted the engine to stop putting a lot of weight on sub-domain. However they still serve their purpose.
Search Engines now acknowledge these sub-domains as different sites and sometimes are putting them in the so called “sandbox.” The negative impact can be fatal, as stated by Monetizer .
Also a negative is that sub-domains sit on the same IP address, so if one site’s IP gets blacklisted, so do all the rest!
And last, a subdomain makes it easy to forget that engines see it as a separate site; this means that you may end up placing more then 4 links between sites and end up penalized for cross linking! A very costly SEO mistake!
Jay over at Google Group stated:
Sub domains have many issue:
… they show up very little in the serps
… Little sites with subs, do very poor if at all
If you must have a sub-domain it would be better actually go and purchase a new domain.
gadgests.com or mycompanygadgets.com
The best way to approach this is to use folder for example:
Mycompany.com/gadgets
Mycompany.com/sub-gadgets
Folders are the way to go if you want to give your website depth. The weight and algorithm is going to be working off the root level and not sharing with a sub-domain. This can also help create better PR, Inbound Links, and internal links campaigns. This will also make it easier to manage.
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July 13th, 2007 at 2:55 pm
Great Article. I always assumed a sub would work better… I’ll have to do some experiments.
July 16th, 2007 at 2:17 am
Good Article. This is answer my confusion about subdomain.
July 31st, 2007 at 11:21 pm
I have always leaned to the subfolder side of things. Thank you for the supporting data Gary.
I also think the subfolder structure is an excellent way to group relevant pages under different “keyword term groupins.” You can get so much more specific when you have pages drilled for certain keyword terms.
Nothing is worse than competing against yourself for rankings.