Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Subdomains and SEO - Should we redirect to subfolder?
-
A new client has mainsite.com and a large numer of city specific sub domains i.e. albany.mainsite.com. I think that these subdomains would actually work better as subfolders i.e mainsite.com/albany rather than albany.mainsite.com. The majority of links on the subdomains link to the main site anyway i.e. mainsite.com/contactus rather than albany.mainsite.com/contactus. Having mostly main domain links on a subdomain doesnt seem like clever link architecture to me and maybe even spammy. Im not overly familiar with redirecting subdomains to subfolders. If we go the route of 301'ing subdomains to subfolders any advice/warnings?
-
Thank you. THANK YOU!
-
In 2010 we redirected two subdomains into folders. The results have been kickass. KICKASS!
-
If you look at a some of the site links you see on google, that is the deep links listed under the main links, you will see that they list subdomains as sub links. WMT recently stated counting links from subdomains as internal links, make of that what you will, but Matt Cutts has stated time and time again that subdomains or subfolders will not make a difference.
-
Thanks.
-
Google has recently changes the way sub folders work so Google now treats sub domains as the same website,
That been said the sub folder is normally a far better option due to internal linking factors behind the domain and it works as a more powerful option over time from my experience.
You can do internal re directs, we have done 100s over the years and not had many dramas, just make sure you map out the correct re directs to correct folders.
I would really research the level of localized traffic per sub folder, research into the new Google changes into sub folders, and look at Google ad preview for GEO based serps based on your domains based per state to see what the potential problems could be. You really need to do a risk analysis for the client, we have done a few of these recently for global travel clients who have had similar issues.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Is an iframe redirect on the same Domain bad for SEO
Good morning. We have a vendor that has created a landing page with content that we want to use. Because of the way we built the site, the only way to use the content is to create an i-frame. The i-frame is re-directingon the same Domain. Would we benefit from the SEO Content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jdenbo_edf0 -
Do bulk 301 redirects hurt seo value?
We are working with a content based startup that needs to 301 redirect a lot of its pages to other websites. Will give you an example to help you understand. If we assume this is the startups domain and URL structure www.ourcompany.com/brand1/article What they want to do is do a 301 redirect of www.ourcompany.com/brand1/ to www.brand1.com I have never seen 301 as a problem to SEO or link juice. But in this case where all the major URLs are getting redirected to other sites i was wondering if it would have a negative effect. Right now they have just 20-30 brands but they are planning to hit a couple of hundreds this year.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aaronfernandez0 -
Onsite SEO vs Offsite SEO
Hey I know the importance of both onsite & offsite, primarily with regard to outreach/content/social. One thing I am trying to determine at the moment, is how much do I invest in offsite. My current focus is to improve our onpage content on product pages, which is taking some time as we have a small team. But I also know our backlinks need to improve. I'm just struggling on where to spend my time. Finish the onsite stuff by section first, or try to do a bit of both onsite/offsite at the same time?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
Blog subdomain not redirecting
Over the last few weeks I have been focused on fixing high and medium priority issues, as reported by the Moz crawler, after a recent transition to WordPress. I've made great progress, getting the high priority issues down from several hundred (various reasons, but many duplicates for things like non-www and www versions) to just five last week. And then there's this weeks report. For reasons I can't fathom, I am suddenly getting hundreds of duplicate content pages of the form http://blog.<domain>.com</domain> (being duplicates with the http://www.<domain>.com</domain> versions). I'm really unclear on why these suddenly appeared. I host my own WordPress site ie WordPress.org stuff. In Options / General everything refers to http://www.<domain>.com</domain> and has done for a number of weeks. I have no idea why the blog versions of the pages have suddenly appeared. FWIW, the non-www version of my pages still redirect to the www version, as I would expect. I'm obviously pretty concerned by this so any pointers greatly appreciated. Thanks. Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarkWill0 -
Blog On Subdomain - Do backlinks to the blog posts on Subdomain count as links for main site?
I want to put blog on my site. The IT department is asking that I use a subdomain (myblog.mysite.com) instead of a subfolder (mysite.com/myblog). I am worried b/c it was my understanding that any links I get to my blog posts (if on subdomain) will not count toward the main site (search engines would view almost as other website). The main purpose of this blog is to attract backlinks. That is why I prefer the subfolder location for the Blog. Can anyone tell me if I am thinking about this right? Another solution I am being offered is to use a reverse proxy. Thoughts? Thank you for your time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ecerbone0 -
.htaccess 301 Redirect Help! Specific Redirects and Blanket Rule
Hi there, I have the following domains: OLD DOMAIN: domain1.co.uk NEW DOMAIN: domain2.co.uk I need to create a .htaccess file that 301 redirects specific, individual pages on domain1.co.uk to domain2.co.uk I've searched for hours to try and find a solution, but I can't find anything that will do what I need. The pages on domain1.co.uk are all kinds of filenames and extensions, but they will be redirected to a Wordpress website that has a clean folder structure. Some example URL's to be redirected from the old website: http://www.domain1.co.uk/charitypage.php?charity=357 http://www.domain1.co.uk/adopt.php http://www.domain1.co.uk/register/?type=2 These will need to be redirected to the following URL types on the new domain: http://www.domain2.co.uk/charities/ http://www.domain2.co.uk/adopt/ http://www.domain2.co.uk/register/ I would also like a blanket/catch-all redirect from anything else on www.domain1.co.uk to the homepage of www.domain2.co.uk if there isn't a specific individual redirect in place. I'm literally tearing my hair out with this, so any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Townpages0 -
303 redirect
Hi, 303 redirect is a good thing or not ? I have a homepage in 2 languages FR and EN > mywebsite.com/fr/ and mywebsite.com/en/. A 303 redirect is on mywebsite.com to mywebsite.com/fr/. Thanks D.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | android_lyon0 -
Should we stream videos from a subdomain or subfolder?
This is causing some hand-wrangling and I need some help. Let's say we were developing rich video content for our products and our agency is hosting the content on a new external server. There are already plans to link to these videos from product detail pages, category pages, and landing pages on our main website: www.example.com. Would it be better to create a new subdomain or to use a subfolder with a reverse proxy technique for this video content? It's not truly a microsite and will not have a gallery page to navigate the various videos. For example, would it be better to use this: video.example.com/ ...or this (executed with a reverse proxy😞 www.example.com/video/ Of course, regardless of whether this new content will live on a subdomain or within a subfolder, we plan on creating a video Sitemap using guidance from Justin Hammack in this terrific post.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ryan-Ricketts1