Which Is Better for SEO? Sub Domains or Sub Directories?

by Devesh Chauhan seo expert, digital marketing, wordpress developer

The URLs and the navigation of a site do matter for SEO but the elements of site structure that affect SEO don’t end here. For example, take sub domains and subdirectories. These are another example of a site’s structural elements that do influence how Google ranks results. While the difference between when a page is in a subdirectory (also called a sub folder) vs when it’s on a subdomain might not be always huge, there are cases when it really matters if you use sub domains or sub directories.

The Difference Between a Sub Domain and a Sub Directory:

First, we clarify the difference between subdirectories & subdomains before we discuss the advantages and disadvantages. In the subdomain, our Urls will look like this: abc.yoursite.com / subdomain.domain.com.
we use the sub-domain part before the domain this part for google and site visitors, and the content of the subdomain and domain is different from each other. Subdomains are used for business sites. where the blog is separate from the site. i.e. blog.yoursite.com, Site with the forum, forum.yoursite.com. There is no rule when SEO Expert uses subdomain and when subdirectories but if your content is good and unique from your website, then you go with subdomain and if your content is not much different from your main content then you go with subdirectories.

SEO Benefits of Sub Domains:

It’s hard to say whether subdomains are better for SEO or not because Search Engine Optimization (SEO) depends on many other factors. However, one of the cases, where you would benefit from a separate domain, is when you have multiple pages for a single keyword. Google generally limits the number of search results per domain, but this doesn’t apply to subdomains. For Ex. if you had a domain with subdirectories and have 5 relevant results, Google will show only 1 or 2 of them, but if you had 5 subdomains 2 or 3 results per subdomain (10 to 15 altogether) will be shown. subdomain just to trick Google to show more results from your site ‐ this might not work and you will have wasted your time and effort

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