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Which one is best for blog SEO: subdomain or subfolder?
Hi all,
About a year ago this company separated its blog from the main domain.
domainname (DOT) com (SLASH) blog **TO** blog (DOT) domainname (DOT) com
Organic traffic has dropped as well as conversations (as there are CTA buttons at the bottom of some articles).
Could this affect the overall SEO performance of the blog pages and the other static pages?
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16 Replies
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Yes. It will affect SEO performance. Always 301 redirect from old pages to new pages.
Unless they are already 301 redirected then you shouldn’t worry too much. Optimize the website as usual. But you still need to do some analytics housekeeping making sure the blog.domain.com is being tracked in google search console and google analytics.
On a side note, I’m not a fan of subdomains for blogs, to be honest. I’d like to put everything in 1 dominant domain unless special circumstances subdomains for blogs are needed.
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Practical tests point to subfolders having the slight edge but really you can use either. It should be an issue of which is more relevant to your site. However, I recommend against using a lot of subdirectories on a domain as it could lead to a limitation of how much ranking value your main domain could achieve.
The site you are referring to most likely is suffering the results of not properly linking between the subdomain and main domain.
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If they didn’t properly redirect their previous /blog/ pages to the subdomain, then organic traffic would have definitely dropped.
Unless the company is an enterprise, it’s usually best to keep the blog as a subfolder as opposed to a subdomain. I read some study a year or so ago where they compared subfolders to subdomains, and essentially the difference between the two were not statistically significant enough to say one way or another.
There are a lot of variables that go into page performance. Usually, these issues come down to content. Individuals and companies often times overestimate the quality of their content. Without looking at any direct data, it’s hard to give any sort of definitive answer to this question.
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I had somewhat similar situation. One of my client website is on html and there blogging section was very difficult to maintain for them. So, they switched to subdomain with wordpress in it. However, the sub-domain is not ranking regardless of the content or linking. And at this point I am also confused at what else to do next.
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Definitely keep as a /folder, and *not* as a subdomain. Google sees subdom’s as completely separate sites. 301 *everything*.
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Always use sub folder not subdomain otherwise it will affect negatively to your seo.
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Ok they are using a custom CMS for their main domain and apparently, due to lack of resources they preferred changing to a subdomain, using WordPress, that is the reason why.
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A subdomain is a part of the main website. But, it’s considered a separate entity by the search engines. The subfolder strategy concentrates your keywords onto a single domain while the subdomain strategy spreads your keywords across multiple distinct domains.
In a word, the subfolder strategy results in better root domain authority.
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sub-folder is better for SEO
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If you are a startup, it is better to consider sub-folder instead of a sub-domain for optimizing SEO.
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Yes
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In my search reality, I almost never see subdomains in any search results. Based on that I avoid them 100%.
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Subdomain and subfolder are different strategies for instrumenting root domains with new features. Setting up a subfolder is trivial on basic websites. A web server treats its subfolder the same as a regular old folder in a file system. Basic sites are already organized using subfolders out of the box.
Subdomains are neat. If we want to make an informed decision about the best strategy, if we are interested in SEO, we opt for Google bot. Subdomains and subfolders are equal in the eyes of Google bot, according to Google itself.
A subdomain is equal and distinct from a root domain. This means that subdomains keywords are treated separately from the root domain.
CONCLUSION:
If you are a startup or small business looking to optimize your SEO, consider subfolder over subdomains. Boosting the authority of your root domain should be a universal goal of any organization.
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sub-folder is better for SEO.
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