Subdomain or Subdirectory – Which Is Better for Your WordPress SEO?

Too often, search engine optimization can seem like a game you play without reading the manual and learning the rules. Of course, you can find out a lot about the basics of SEO and even dig into the finer details with it. You can learn all about search engines and how they work, and get incredibly useful free tools to optimize your website as much as possible.

However, you will still mostly be working with information that other people decipher about search engines and the algorithms they use. The companies that run the search engines won’t disclose the information so easily because knowing the exact rules of the ranking game would be tantamount to cheating. Strange but true.

It gets even weirder because even though search engines sometimes give us some information, you have to be really careful when applying it. An example of this is the “subdomain and subdirectory for SEO” discussion. Google says you should be fine with both, but experience shows something else.

Which one should you use? Let’s find out! In this article we will consider:

Subdomains and Subdirectories – What’s the Difference?

Subdomains and subdirectories are two different things you can use to structure your website and create a hierarchy within it. With subdomains, you’re essentially creating separate sites within the main, root domain. With subdirectories you are creating what is essentially a folder on your website.

Let’s say you want to create a blog as part of your website. If you want to create it as a subdomain, you can do so from cPanel or an FTP client. So if your website is www.example.com your blog can be blog.example.com if you add it as a subdomain.. You will notice that the “www” part is now “blog” – both refer to a subdirectory and are located to the left of the root domain.

If you choose to add the blog as a subdirectory, you’ll also need to go to cPanel or an FTP client. The result will appear on the right from the root domain, and it will look like www.example.com/blog.

The difference in structure and hierarchy is not just cosmetic or organizational. Subdomains are often viewed as separate websites on the same root domain, while subdirectories always remain part of the root domain or whatever subdomain they are placed on. And from the experience of search engine optimization experts, it seems that there are results.

Why Is One Better Than The Other for SEO?

The concern here is that a search engine like Google handles subdomains and subdirectories differently. A subdirectory is part of the root domain and all the SEO essence from the content in that part of the website is attributed to the main website.. You put a blog there and all the keywords, links and query answering content you add will contribute to your website ranking.

But what if you put the blog in the subdomain? This is a good question. Once upon a time – and this is way back in the late 2000s when Google added multiple subdomains to try and populate the results page because Google allowed two results per subdomain. Google then addressed the issue and revisited it with the 2019 site diversity change, which limited the number of listings on the same website to two in top results.

This site diversity change means you’ll often see no more than two listings from the same site in our top results. However, we may still show more than two in cases where our systems have determined that they are particularly relevant for a particular search….

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) 6 June 2019

In the same announcement, Google Treating subdomains as part of the root domain unless it makes sense to treat them as separate websites and none of these changes apply to ranking. Google doesn’t mix domain names.

In some cases, we may decide to treat subdomains as their own site if it seems genuinely relevant. And none of this includes ranking. We don’t mix domains or do anything else. It’s just about roll-up when we decide to showcase it.

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) June 7, 2019

Here’s the thing – We know from previous announcements from the good folks at Google that it’s okay to have either one on your website.. However, according to the SEO community, this means that your website will not suffer if you put a particularly SEO-helpful part of your website behind a subdomain. However, you will run into a few problems.

For example, since subdomains are considered separate websites for ranking, If you optimize the content for the same keywords, you can compete with yourself for ranking. Also, Any authority you create with your public content will be dilutedi.e. divide it between sections of your website hosted on different subdomains.

You’ll see it in practice if you look at what happens when people move their blogs from subdomains to subfolders. Often the result is the same – a significant increase in the website’s search engine performance. But does that mean you should always configure your website so that everything is under the same root domain? Of course not.

When to Use Which One?

The real problem with the whole sub-domain-subdirectory-sub-directory for SEO is that there are no hard and unambiguous rules you can follow. For example, you have all these websites that are seeing an increase as they move their blogs to subdirectories. You can visit again later Blog like HubSpot’s and notice that it is located in a subdomain. It’s very unlikely that the folks at HubSpot did this accidentally.

Of course they didn’t. Their blog is big enough to have its own hierarchy. They may also have come to the conclusion that keeping it separate from the root domain helps them build their blog separately from their other products, and that any benefit of the user experience from easier navigation is enough to offset any harm from using a subdomain instead. can be said. from a subdirectory.

What you should do is what makes the most sense for your website. Sure, you can put a blog in a subdirectory. But does this make it easier or harder to navigate the website? In some cases, like when you use WordPress for the blog and another CMS for the rest of the website, you may have no choice but to use a subdomain. Technical requirements will impose restrictions.

Then there are the parts of the website that don’t add enough to the search engine rankings to be significant. A support center is a common example, and you’ll often find it hosted on a subdomain. Different branches of a large company may also qualify for subdomains on the company website. The same can be true for different language versions of the website.

But an online store might be better suited for a location in a subdirectory. All the products, descriptions, and meta content that are part of an online store create some great content that can help your website search engine ranking.

Let’s wrap it up!

While there is no clear-cut winner between subdomains and subdirectories when it comes to SEO benefits for your WordPress website, smart money SEO is putting juicy content in a subdirectory. But if this is causing more trouble than harm, or if you’re producing enough content to deserve a separate hierarchy, it might be a good idea to look into a subdomain. For parts of the website that are not that rich in content, or for those with a structure that makes placing it on the same root domain a navigational nightmare – like this sentence – a subdomain may be the clearer choice.