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Subdomains vs Subdirectories which is better for SEO

Johannes Beus (Author) 25.01.2018Yesterday, Barry Schwarz reported on the fight between SEOs and Google over how Google treats Subdomains and Subdirectories. At SISTRIX, we subscribe to Johannes Müller statement: “Google web search is fine with using either subdomains or subdirectories”, which confirms what Matt Cutts said in October 2012. And this is true, both subdomains and subfolders have equal opportunities. The problem here is that Google and SEOs each have a different point of view. Rand Fishkin is talking about something that almost every single SEO has seen before. When you move from Subdomain to Subdirectory, you rank much better, and you get more organic traffic from Google. This is what the real world looks like: Monster moved /jobs/ from subdomain to subfolderThe same for Monster.de on Google Germany: Monster moved their /jobs/ from a subdomain to a subfolder on Google GermanyLet’s complete the picture with https (because http and https are 2 diferent URLs): Monster moved from Sudomains to Subfolders on Google GermanyNext let’s look at Germany’s largest telecommunications provider, Deutsche Telekom AG (the same people behind T-Mobile), and their online news portal, t-online.de. They moved their advisory guides from the subdomain to a subfolder:

But why does this happen

Assuming that Google web search is fine with using either subdomains or subdirectories, the reason must lie within the website itself. First, when we move from subdomains to subdirectories, it often also implicitly means that we are doing something new and probably something better than before (new design, better usability, better URLs, better content, better internal links, etc). That could be one reason for better rankings on Google. Second comes the systems we use. Many systems in use are not optimised for subdomains. Subdomains are complex, requires more time and attention, special content management systems (CMS) and oftentimes they are not well interlinked, some of them are even not in the navigational menu of the main site. Try it yourself by figuring out how to get to the subdomain teachers.theguardian.com, from using the following navigational menu? Honestly, I don’t really know how to get there when I use theguardian.com.

When Subdomains makes sense

If you pay attention to the right site of the picture, you will find 2 links to 2 different subdomains “Jobs” and “Dating”. In these cases, it makes sense to use different subdomains, as the core business of The Guardian is news, and not either Jobs nor Soulmates. I hope you like it. Johannes Beus (Author) 25.01.2018Related posts Want to slowly kill your content on Google? Simply use a directory structure with dates The main reason to avoid dates within your directory structure is explained on page number 8 of the Google’s Search Engine... Johannes Beus15. September 2016 SEOs should care more about using redirects correctly than how much PageRank gets passed For a long time, many SEOs have been talking about whether 301/302/307 Redirects pass on PageRank. Now, Google has confirmed... Johannes Beus23. August 2016 German English Spanish Italian French