The Great Subdomain vs. Subfolder Debate, what is the best answer?

[RosemaryB]

Recently one of my clients was hesitant to move their new store locator pages to a subdomain.  They have some SEO knowledge and cited the whiteboard Friday article at https://outdoorsrank.com/blog/subdomains-vs-subfolders-rel-canonical-vs-301-how-to-structure-links-optimally-for-seo-whiteboard-friday.

While it is very possible that Rand Fiskin has a valid point I felt hesitant to let this be the final verdict.  John Mueller from Google Webmaster Central claims that Google is indifferent towards subdomains vs subfolders.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h1t5fs5VcI#t=50

Also this SEO disagreed with Rand Fiskin’s post about using sub folders instead of sub domains.  He claims that Rand Fiskin ran only 3 experiments over 2 years, while he has tested multiple subdomain vs subfolder experiments over 10 years and observed no difference.

http://www.seo-theory.com/2015/02/06/subdomains-vs-subfolders-what-are-the-facts-on-rankings/

Here is another post from the Website Magazine.  They too believe that there is no SEO benefits of a subdomain vs subfolder infrastructure.  Proper SEO and infrastructure is what is most important.

http://www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/archive/2015/03/10/seo-inquiry-subdomains-subdirectories.aspx

Again Rand might be right, but I rather provide a recommendation to my client based on an authoritative source such as a Google engineer like John Mueller.

Does anybody else have any thoughts and/or insight about this?

[BlastAM]

I think Mueller's main point may be that if you treat your subdomains separately from your main site, Google will treat them differently as well. For example, if you have three subdomains - www, blog and cloud - but all of them have different navigation, css and limited interlinking and little keyword theme commonality, Google will treat them as separate sites and you will suffer the dreaded subdomain issue.

BUT if you integrate the three domains well - same nav, same look & feel and lots of good contextual anchor text interlinking, Google will treat it as the same site and the subdomain issue will become moot.

Has anyone done any testing with those variables?

[randfish]

Yup! All the case studies I showed above (and plenty since) have demonstrated that you can boost traffic by moving from the subdomain to a subfolder.

[martarus]

Great thread! What about a situation where a blog already sits on a subdomain (bearing in mind it hasn't been driving a significant amount of traffic as the site is fairly new). My recommendation would be to move to subfolder, would you agree?

Thank you!

[Kevin.Bekker]

This is my new favorite quote... "I understand that Google's representatives have the authority of working at Google going for them, but I also believe they're wrong." (Rand Fishkin)

[Tommytims]

Greetings All,

So the debate goes on and I personally think the value of subfolders versus directories certainly makes sense especially from a linking, age and juice perspective.   I do notice in most articles they talk about the benefits for subfolders as it relates to blogs.  In past tests and studies, you have shed any insight into how this may affect ecommerce as it relates to countries.

We currently have each country on a subdomain and can run it through webmaster tools and geotarget the country however are considering switching to subfolders, based on all the articles we've read.   This would in such drive many more links back to each new subfolder assuming the majority of our links are from "www".   It would seem to make sense to switch to subfolders and would be especially helpful as new sub-folders were launched.

I was just wondering if the same argument can be made when it comes to ecommerce and country specific sites.  Each site (currently different subdomains) uses a different language and currency.   Meta and content is different for each.   We launched "www" over 15 years ago but in the past 2 years have introduced various subdomains (ie new languages).   As we enter into new countries, we are considering switching everything over to subfolders (obviously with 301'ing the subdomains over to the new subfolders so we dont lose all our existing links).

Im assuming since your studies indicate, you'd think this to be a good idea however all the talk has not been so much about countries and ecommerce.  Any one have any light or information they can share with regards to the topic??

Thnkxs

[randfish]

Hi Rosemary - thankfully, I have data, not just opinions to back up my arguments:

• In 2014, Moz moved our Beginner's Guide to SEO from guides.outdoorsrank.com to outdoorsrank.com itself. Rankings rose immediately, with no other changes. We ranked higher not only for "seo guide" (outranking Google themselves) but also for "beginners guide" a very broad phrase.
• Check out https://iwantmyname.com/blog/2015/01/seo-penalties-of-moving-our-blog-to-a-subdomain.html - goes into very clear detail about how what Google says about subdomains doesn't match up with realities
• Check out some additional great comments in this thread, including a number from site owners who moved away from subdomains and saw ranking benefits, or who moved to them and saw ranking losses: https://inbound.org/discuss/it-s-2014-what-s-the-latest-thinking-on-sub-domains-vs-sub-directories
• There's another good thread (with some more examples) here: https://inbound.org/blog/the-sub-domain-vs-sub-directory-seo-debate-explained-in-one-flow-chart

Ultimately, it's up to you. I understand that Google's representatives have the authority of working at Google going for them, but I also believe they're wrong. It could be that there's no specific element that penalized subdomains and maybe they're viewed the same in Google's thinking, but there are real ways in which subdomains inherit authority that stay unique to those subdomains and it IS NOT passed between multiple subdomains evenly or equally. I have no horse in this race other than to want to help you and other site owners from struggling against rankings losses - and we've just seen too many when moving to a subdomain and too many gains moving to a subfolder not to be wary.

[LoganRay]

Hi,

I've not seen any comment from Googlers regarding this debate. I realize I'm keeping this in the Moz-sphere, which isn't quite what you're looking for, but this quote is from Moz's domain setup guide:

"Since search engines keep different metrics for domains than they do subdomains, it is recommended that webmasters place link-worthy content like blogs in subfolders rather than subdomains. (i.e. www.example.com/blog/ rather than blog.example.com) The notable exceptions to this are language-specific websites. (i.e., en.example.com for the English version of the website)."

I think that quote is pretty compelling towards the subdirectory side of this quandry. I also recommend checking out the comments on the Whiteboard Friday link you posted, there is plenty of evidence there as well.

Unfortunately, this debate will probably go on forever until we get definitive word from Google.

[anthonydnelson]

Can you share some details why you want to "move" the store locator to a subdomain? That makes me think it is already operational in a subfolder at the moment. In general, I would recommend not moving content unless there is a very good reason for it.