I’ve been wondering between subdomain or subfolder which is the best [1] for managing a subsection of a website. Which really is the best practice for a webmaster in line with best SEO best practices. Putting a section of a website e.g blog or forum in a subfolder so that it appears like www.naijacomputers.com/community or setting it up as a subdomain so that it appears as www.community.naijacomputers.com. This issue is not for this site Business Computers [1] (though in the future I may be tempted to add a forum to Business Computers if my readers so wish).
I have done a lot of searching on this using the search engines, but the arguments for and against each option seems to be 50:50. So, I have not actually gotten much help from my online research.
Maybe I need to spell out what I want.
- I want all the resources for a particular section of the website to be in the same place. A kind of tidy arrangement for easy management or maintenance as you may put it.
- I want the main domain to benefit from whatever link juice that the sub-section attracts. Meanwhile I don’t want the link juice of the main domain to be diluted as a result of the several pages that that section will contain. The keywords for the section will be a little departure from the main keywords that the main domain is focused on.
It may sound like me wanting to eat my cake and still have it. Well, I am using this post to get useful suggestion on this issue. I believe in asking for help when I need it. So if you have a solution for me, kindly drop it in a comment. Thanks.
4 Comments To "SubDomain Or SubFolder Which Is Best"
#1 Comment By Udegbunam Chukwudi On February 16, 2010 @ 4:51 pm
In my opinion, according to what you are looking for, you’re better off with a subdomain. To preserve the link juice/pagerank of the main domain, DO NOT LINK to their subdomain from the main domain or add the nofollow attribute to every link on the main domain pointing to the subdomain.
Linking to the main domain from the subdomain will transfer some link juice. Just make sure that the links are dofollow.
Just my 2 cents as a newbie to SEO concerns! lol
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#2 Comment By Leke On March 3, 2010 @ 4:57 am
@ Chukwudi
Thanks for your suggestion.
#3 Comment By Dallas Computer Repair On August 14, 2010 @ 6:36 pm
Basically from what I have learned is the subdomains acts as a seperate topic but distinct topic somewhat related to the domain wherefore the domain where folders reside are for seperate but closely related topics to the domain.
#4 Comment By kenny kings On August 26, 2010 @ 9:01 pm
Using subdomains can help you rank for other keywords that you are looking to rank for.
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