🔍 SEO Insights Sub-domain or sub-directory

[Timgab]

Sub-domain and subdirectory are two different things in SEO. The choice between these two is a critical one for any website's SEO.

When it comes to site ranking, subdirectory is ranked along side with your main site. But on contrary sub-domain are been indexed and ranked differently from your main site.

What will be your choice?

For me I'll choose sub-directoy over the other.

 

[kolakube]

I think subdomains can look really cool (like forum.domain.com) but they are usually not worth the hassle.

Beyond technical reasons a good domain should be easy to sound out if you are communicating it verbally, and a subdirectory structure tends to sound more familiar.

 

[Aussie]

I think subdomains look better.

 

[Empire]

Keeps it clean and also makes the index smaller and so makes your members to do less scrolling

 

[Arantor]

The minute you’re integrating two apps together, subdomains rapidly become the only viable choice.

Imagine for a moment you have WordPress at the top level. The minute you try to put any other app inside a subdirectory it is going to have all sorts of issues.

Now, it’s technically possible to get around this (if you’re me, you can even do things like having the / served by Python/Django and specific subfolders being complete PHP apps) but the level of fudging required soon becomes problematic.

Most applications and frameworks have no ability to even live correctly except as domain or subdomain.

 

[kolakube]

Imagine for a moment you have WordPress at the top level. The minute you try to put any other app inside a subdirectory it is going to have all sorts of issues.

On this particular example, are the issues regarding permalinks/redirects? I have been using WP/XF interchangeably with this setup and not seen any issues, at least on the surface.

 

[Arantor]

In my experience, it doesn't matter - WordPress's htaccess shenanigans generally interfere with anything in subdirectories because htaccess cascades downwards.

If you're solely on nginx, this may be better for you, but a lot of hosting out there is still Apache based where it tends to go to heck.

I had *years* of people doing what you're talking about, only WP + SMF, and it always ended poorly because WP would screw around with the request before it got to SMF.

 

[Darth Cognus]

Whatever you pick, for the love of god be consistent. I visit a site that has wiki.sitename and then sitename/forum and it bugs me to no end.

 

[kolakube]

In my experience, it doesn't matter - WordPress's htaccess shenanigans generally interfere with anything in subdirectories because htaccess cascades downwards.

If you're solely on nginx, this may be better for you, but a lot of hosting out there is still Apache based where it tends to go to heck.

I had *years* of people doing what you're talking about, only WP + SMF, and it always ended poorly because WP would screw around with the request before it got to SMF.

I also see cookies mix across subdirectory sites, which is tempting but overall not a reliable data source to do anything serious with.

 

[Arantor]

Depends how in control of that cookie you really are. I’ve certainly done things like bridging an SMF to MediaWiki using the cookies (though SMF let’s you be really fine grained about it, whether you want it to cross subdomains etc)

 

[Jason]

I wouldn't want a site based on a subdirectory, unless it was something on social media. Well, for instance, my main non-personal FB page is Facebook.com/(the name of the page). Anyway, you don't have a choice in that matter anyhow.