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April 4, 2006

Subdirectories vs. Subdomains: Which is Better?

At the moment, there's evidence to indicate that Google doesn't identify subdomains as belonging to the main domain (though that could be addressed, at least in part, with these new Big Daddy data centers finally rolled out). The most obvious evidence is that each subdomain gets its own SERP listing. Check a search for Google and notice how one company dominates almost the entire first page.

The other indication is Google's longstanding canonicalization issue. Google has long had a problem where it treated the www version of a site as being a different site than the non-www version. So, in Google's eyes, the following were two different sites:

http://esoos.com

http://www.esoos.com

...even though they are clearly the same site. Of course, the www is just another type of subdomain, so it's possible that Google's intention (with Big Daddy) to fix its ability to recognize the www subdomain as belonging to the main site will lead to Google being able to better identify other subdomains as well.

Of course, there's no indication (that I've seen) that Google wants to identify subdomains as belonging to the same site. Until they do, it means that having lots of subdomains versus using subdirectories is similar to having lots of little sites versus one big site. There are pros and cons to each. I tend to prefer focusing on putting all the energy into one primary site as opposed to spreading links around to a bunch of niche sites.

Another point is that if you're considering taking an existing site and breaking it into subdomains, that could create problems. If Google didn't see the subdomain as belonging to the same site as the original domain, and you moved part of your site into a subdomain, your main domain would lose many of its pages and internal links.

There are three reasons why I would choose a subdomain over a subdirectory.

First, it can make it easier to get keywords into your inbound links, since many linking pages will use the keywords in the domain and subdomain in the anchor text of the link.

Second, search engine algorithms are always changing, so there are be times when keywords in the subdomain outperform keywords in the subdirectory.

And third, if you have an exceptional strong SEO campaign going for you (or huge brand strength), you might be able to push any competing pages further down in the search results. This might be useful if you have a lot of negative pages coming up in a search for your company name, for instance.

However, under most conditions I would go with the subdirectory to avoid spreading my efforts too thin.

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