Read Article in : English | Chinese


What is a Subdomain?

A subdomain is a division or alias of your domain that can be used to organize your existing website into a separate site. Typically, subdomains are used if there is content that is distinct from the rest of the site. Subdomains are indicated by the section to the left of the root URL. For instance, blog.examplesite.com and shop.examplesite.com are subdomains of www.examplesite.com.

Since subdomains are used to house sections of your site that are completely different than the scope of your main site, one of the reasons businesses use subdomains is because they need different servers and software to run these separate sections of their site. Many sites use subdomains for mobile versions of their blogs or stores. If your site has an international audience, separate subdomains allow for variations in content and language, but all versions are linked together under the main site.


Advantages of Subdomains

  1. Search engines see subdomains as unique websites unrelated to the main domain.  This could have the potential to allow subdomains you create to appear along your parent domain in search engine results pages (SERPs), pushing your competition further down in results, enhancing your authority for your product or service
  2. Subdomains can be used to target a specific market segment, reading group, or country
  3. The ability to utilize a keyword for clarity, search engine, and promotional purposes. When you use google maps, the url is formatted maps.google.com which describes it’s exact purpose.
  4. When used correctly, if a subdomain is created for an already existing site that ranks well, the subdomain will be indexed quickly and benefit from the main domain’s good standing.


What is a Subdirectory?


A subdirectory is the part of the url that houses a specific subset of content. A website is like a filing cabinet, the folders within the cabinet would be the subdirectories of your site. Individual directories are located to the right of the domain. Example: www.examplesite.com/blog or www.examplesite.com/shop

When creating your site, subdirectories are the most straightforward way to organize related pieces of content on your site. Assets such as images or downloads would be in their own subdirectories


Advantages of Subdirectories


Using subdirectories over subdomains has several advantages when looked at for SEO purposes:

  1. Instead of competing with yourself with a subdomain that may have fresher content than your main domain, your focus could be on making a single website optimized.
  2. Your site could get crawled more often as you are constantly adding content and blog posts; because of this, the SEO authority that you have will be inherited by your  primary site.
  3. If you have a blog post focusing on new features or products, your users can easily go between your blog and your product/service pages.
  4. Finally, if you are tracking your site’s performance in a platform such as Google Analytics, the data is consolidated for the entire site, rather than having to look at two data points as a result of using two domains.


Which is Method is Preferred?


This is a somewhat debated issue, however subdirectories are generally the preferred method, Every website is different and the question of subdirectory vs subdomain should be made on a case by case basis.