Subdomains & SEO: Best Practices

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Like every Friday, it's " Whiteboard Friday " at Moz! This Friday, Rand Fishkin answered three questions that often come up in SEO when talking about subdomains:

1. Should I put subsections of my site in subdomains or subfolders? 2. Should I use a rel=canonical or a 301 redirect to move my content from a separate site to my main domain? 3. If I have multiple websites that all point to my main site, is this a benefit or a disadvantage for my SEO?

Subdomains or subfolders?
subdomains

While subdomains can be beneficial because they require tunisia mobile database less work from a technical perspective, they can be very dangerous from an SEO perspective. Here's how.

Let's imagine. You own http://blog.yoursite.com. Today, search engines are theoretically able to examine the content on this subdomain and consider it as valid for the main domain. As a result, all links, user data, and ranking signals are considered as a whole that can benefit both the domain and the subdomain. However, in this paragraph, the word "theoretically" is important!

In fact, Moz tested the following operation for you: first placing content on a subdomain and then moving it to the main domain. Each time, rankings and traffic were boosted, both on the long tail and the head of the demand curve. The reverse operation has also already been tested , and the damage to traffic was considerable.

Bottom line: Google is certainly making efforts in this direction, but it's not good enough yet. We strongly recommend keeping your content on a single root domain and subdomain , preferably in subfolders. This way, you'll maximize your potential SEO advantage.