Hey y’all! Welcome to another WordPress Wednesday, my name is Kori Ashton (WebTegrity-San Antonio, TX) and this is a weekly program where I get drunk at my desk, and talk about WordPress-nerdy stuff. I’m kidding-I don’t get drunk. That’s actually a shout out to Matt Bellassai who does his weekly “Wine About It.” If y’all haven’t caught that yet, it’s viral off of BuzzFeed. Check that out. It’s pretty crass and ridiculous; but at the same time some of his episodes are pretty darn funny.
All right now today we are talking about sub-domain vs. sub-folder. This is a hot topic! I’m sure that the thread down below is going to blow up with all sorts of people who are highly, highly opinionated about this topic.
If you are looking to choose which one to use for better SEO practices-does using a sub-domain hurt your SEO? Or does it hurt your Google ranking? It is question that has been asked for all of ages. People have asked this for years and years and years now. Matt Cutts from Google answered it at one certain point. (I’ll give you the reference to that video.)
However, SEO companies and SEO individuals who are specialized in this industry have (for months and years even) gone back and forth; haggling over what is best practices for your website.
Today, I’m going to chime in with my two senses and give you my opinion as to what I found their opinions to be. If you have any questions on this further, you’re more than welcome to put them in the description box below. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel and you can also checkout my class over on WebTegrity.com.
I’ll put that link in the description box below on where you can learn more about the basics of SEO (if you’re struggling.) This would be the basics. “Best practices “of SEO.”
All right. So, “sub-domain vs. sub-folder.” Let me talk to you about what these actually look like:
A sub-domain would be this. Let’s say-blog.mydomain(name).com.
Then a folder would be- mydomain(name).com/blog.
All right. These are the two variations that a lot of people struggle with. They wonder if putting things on a sub-domain like this will actually affect the ranking of my root domain (this,) or if having my root domain first and then putting my blog over here in a little sub-folder would be better practices? Truthfully, this is a huge topic. If you do a Google search for this, you’re going to see all sorts of highly opinionated people chiming in.
What is my preference? I’m going to chime in and say that best practices for me and what we’ve found directly with our clients at WebTegrity is go ahead and put them in a sub-folder. If you’re just starting out and you’re able to manage a large blog (if that’s the way you’re going to grow it) with your information based site or your business site. Having a blog inside of a sub-folder is pretty fantastic. One of the reasons why I suggest doing that is because that is the natural way WordPress allows your blog to be displayed on your Website. So you can kind of cross market everything very easily. You can have your most recent posts appearing on your home page. You can have your categories running down your sidebar. Everything can be kind of in just one spot.
If you were to break these apart and put your website (your blog rather) on a sub-domain and kind of have totally separate install; sometimes it’s more difficult then to cross-market the two and have the content from the sub-domain actually appear on the root-domain. It takes quite a bit of coding to make that happen. So I just want to throw that out there to you. If you are in fact, already have a blog somewhere else and you’re just trying to have them all trying to sit in the same domain (in some sense,) then using a sub-domain would probably be your better option.
I’m going to show you a couple of different, highly opinionated people. All of these are very recent. I went through Google and made sure that the references that I’m showing you were in the 2015. Of course, we’re just at the end of 2015 moving into 2016. So these would all be relevant still. Sub-domain vs. Sub-folders: An SEO Guide to the Facts. This guy, Michael Martinez here once again. He slams MOZ and says basically that they don’t know what they’re talking about. That using a sub-domain would work fine as long as you do it right. So he talks repeatedly and references the articles that I’m about to show you-which are these:
This is from MOZ. If you’re familiar at all with SEO, you’ve probably heard of MOZ (especially with WordPress.) This is just about the same time that the other article was written and apparently they were referencing this article. They have white board Fridays and they talk about specifically sub-domain vs. sub-folder. If you were to read the transcript you’re going to see right away that they do talk about Google-stating that they’ve made strides in this area, but they definitely (if you read through this entire article-I’ll put the link in the description box below.) They definitely recommend that you keep your blog in a sub-folder. Not on a sub-domain but on a sub-folder in this style. They reference a couple of different case studies that they followed. Even their own case study that they did with their own website. They show you actual Google analytics traffic. The result of the “crash” that happened whenever they moved things to a sub-domain.
The argument is that Google is smart enough now to realize that a sub-domain is part of a root-domain. And while Google is incredibly smart and they’re progressively getting more smart. More intelligent on how to crawl your website.
We’re still seeing people result better typically with sub-folders.
Another article that was on MOZ is all about domains. This is just a great article for best practices when it comes to purchasing a domain name or how to set up your sub-domain vs. sub-folder. Should you use a hyphen or not? Should you use a key rich domain? What does that look like? Does the history of your domain name matter? Meaning; how long it has been active? Does that matter? There are all sorts of questions that will be answered in this really great article that I found for you. I’m going to put the link to this one in the description box below as well.
The other article that I found that was highly (really a great reference for me) was this “I Want My Name.” Now both; this article from Michael as well as this article from MOZ referenced this article. This is one of the case studies. Iwantmyname.com walks you through the case study that they did when they switched their blog from a sub-folder into a sub-domain. They basically tell you (and you can see here) just the “nose dive” that their website took.
Unfortunate, that we’ve learned our lessons the hard way. We do all this and we do this WordPress Wednesday to help y’all (in our WordPress world) make better choices. Hopefully have a better experience with your online marketing vs. what we do as professionals when we even get it wrong.
So, I’m sure that everybody has their opinion on this. If you have in fact done both, (a sub-domain as well as a sub-folder) would you put your case study or your experiences in the description box below? Share them with our community here on our YouTube channel.
Again, I’m just speaking from my personal experience with our clients. Y’all chime up and let me know how you’ve done with sub-domain vs. sub-folder for best SEO practices.
I hope you’re having a really great Wednesday! I will see you next week on WordPress Wednesday. Bye y’all!
