Parry M.
Digital marketing's Hannibal Smith who loves it when a plan comes together
Subdomains vs slashes
I'm rolling out a new website which has a number of child sites feeding off of it. I am wondering if anyone knows if there are any user experience issues, market response, branding etc regarding whether the sites should be:
www.foobar.com/site1
OR
site1.foobar.com
I'm not 100% sure so any feedback/insight would be appreciated!
Clarification added October 20, 2008:
Thanks for all the feedback everyone - in only about 5 minutes, 7 great tidbits of advice! Vive le LinkedIn!
Answers (24)
Christophe P.
Creative Director at Flying Crocodile
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Hi Parry,
I would say it's better to use subdirectores. First because it's easier to use. You just create a folder and voila ! And it doesn't make a big difference for searches. If the content is significantly different than the root domain, then subdomains is better.
As far as user experience, i would say it's easier www.mysite.com/site1 than site1.mysite.com...but you might have other advices on that.
Good luck.
James B.
Social Fusion Pioneer
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I actually do both. With the ebb and flow of Google and other major search engines I've seen the sub-domain perform well and then at other times I've seen the directory approach work well.
Since there is no penalty for duplicate content (see Google's recent blog post confirming this) there is no real problem with covering the bases and using a sub domain and the directory approach.
HOWEVER... I often favour the SUB DOMAIN for one reason and one reason above all others... Here it is:
Classical Advertising Strategy.
If your URL shows up in the listings alongside another then putting your power word or your keyword at the front will help the HUMAN reader get a faster understanding of what you are offering. This will likely lead to increased clicks too. Also, consider that Google is always trying to understand the "meaning" of your page...
Remember we read from left to right and when we seek things we are often trying to immediately decide if the results match our expectations. If you were looking for purple widgets then the following URL design will communicate the value of your website faster.
Purple-Widgets.Domain.com
versus
Domain.com/Purple-Widgets
In the end only time will tell what Google decides is "best" but since that's a moving target I have decided to use classical advertising and copywriting psychology in designing my URLS.
Feel free to copy me and let me know how you make out.
All the best,
James
Links:
Tim B.
"Nice Guy" - Ex-(ex-pat), raconteur, and a Gentleman
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Parry,
In my experience the sub-domain route is a better way to go.
1>all the content in the "folder" is logically sub-divided for your web master, or multiple web site managers. If you have two or more web page builder/ designers, they only work/manage their stuff. FTP permissions are limited etc..
2> Sub-domains give you twice as many keyword options
http:// first-set.URL.com/ 2ndwords.html
I always wonder why people don't take advantage of a completely separate URL for each child site, then link them together as referers. Domain registration and hosting is cheap as hell these days.
Well, if I can answer shortly I would say that both are good, but there are differences in terms of strategy. If your site is really big, and every sub-site has a lot of content, that would be a great way to increase your main domains link popularity. Every subdomain has to act as if it is its own web site and has to have its own links pointing to it.
However, if the subdomains are not going to be strong stand-alone sites, there is no need to use this strategy; subfolders will do just fine. Actually, they will likely even do better since it will push the homepage (or homepages) of your web site.
That is a very short answer, I've attached a source you could consider.
Good luck!
Links:
branding: the first option intimates that its just a folder, the slash is a bit psychologically dismissive and the recapture gets a bit difficult to type in as the name increases. SEO good.
The second implies stronger, integral association with 'foobar'. You may get users typing in www in front of that, though. SEO better.
Web-savvy audience? I would go for #2
Jordan L.
Owner, Zajon Inc. a website and Internet Application development company for marketers and marketing companies.
I am assuming you are only using ONE slash for the child sites. (If you have more than one that is too many for radio or TV and maybe print marketing) There are arguments for or against - I've posted links discussing the pro-s and con's of sub domain vs. a slash. Since Google says they treat sub domains as part of the main domain I haven't seen a compelling argument one way or the other that I have seem. Do what you think is best after reading some other people's discussions.
That said, if you are dealing with corporate divisions which offer different and exclusive services and have a completely different client base. In which case different sub-domains or domains would be appropriate.
Links:
Tibby B.
Trade show exhibits, trade show exhibit design, trade show exhibit fabrication, trade show program management
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I am going BOTH... as mentioned above by someone else.
Vector Displays is a full service trade show / exhibit house for companies working industry shows and capturing convention traffic. We have general information on the "main" web site and city or show specific info on another. Both web sites use a combination of sub-domains and folders.
Look at Vector-Trade-Show-Displays below to see how we've thought it out.
If you need help with your trade show displays / exhibits in 2009, please contact John Monteith at 800-229-3119 in Atlanta.
Links:
Tibby B. also suggests this expert on this topic:
Parry,
There are 2 main aspects that you should take care of:
- SEM
- Content Organization.
Basically the choice is up to you and it should be based on your site's content and its specific needs. But there are a few general rules to follow:
- Subdomains are used for completely different content (e.g: corporate blog, product microsite.)
- Slashes (or subfolders) are used for better content organization, SEM optimization (by using the subfolder name to tell Google what the content is about), and short links to dynamic contents (e-commerce and news sites).
Both are equally effective for branding purposes. Although I prefer slashes, because in reading order, they come after your websites brand.
Take care. Good luck!!
Links:
Peter R.
the SEO Godfather - President of Web Marketing Pros - PR Interactive
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both work well. just remember to use the keywords in the subdirectory name.
Links:
It will also depend on your hosting company - or the company that created your website design. I say this because our platform - Oxycon - gives me the ability to create Redirect links. But they can only be one word after the slash / so if you have a page in the www/footbar.com/site1 site that you want a redirect to - it might get a little tricky.
Good luck
Peter R.
VP Sales at Socialmatica
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Good morning, Parry ~
IMHO, the choice of subdomains versus slashes is >> irrelevant << in 2008.
Ten years ago, maybe. But today, with the sophistication of search engines like Google...who needs to remember URLs???
Think about it: new customer prospects don't know who you are, so it doesn't matter > what < address is. Returning visitors know at least something about you, and can search for you if they didn't bookmark your URL.
Instead of worrying about your URL, you should be far more concerned with being found by online searchers - and that means having more content that's relevant to your perfect prospect on your site than can be found on your competitor's site.
Win the content battle, and it won't matter what your URL is. Lose the content battle, and your URL won't make a difference.
This is not a job for SEO or techies. Creating relevant content - lots of it - is a job for a > marketer <. My strong suggestion would be to retain the services of a talented advertising agency or PR firm.
This is the kind of thing that we do all day long at ASENZ Marketing. Please let me know if I can be of any further assistance.
Best wishes!
Peter Risman
ASENZ Marketing (www.asenz360.com)
VP Sales and Channel Development
prisman@asenz.com
Links:
Peter R. also suggests these experts on this topic:
Just a note for those who are saying both - you will without a doubt divide your search engine rankings in half. Choose one! You can have one do a redirect to the other, and in the case of sub domains ensure you capture www and redirect them appropriately, heck redirect w ww wwww wwwww to the appropriate url too, its simple and free for you to do, and it saves your user having to fix their typo!
These are interchangeable but the rule of thumb I use is larger sites with rapidly updated content and lots of quality content would be best served with subdomain structure.
Folder structures work very well if you can ensure that your folder structures can maintain their structure strongly (ie consider them microsites which would function as is if you were to pull them out into their own sites). Generally what does happen with folder structured information architecture is that they will fall apart due to human error. Ensureing a CMS is in place to automate the element of a tightly linked logical structure will save you there.
I've also utilized a combination of subdomain and folder structures in the past on large projects. Major sections get their subdomains and tertiary areas which would be leveraged for tail of search can beneath the individual domains as folder structures.
Let me know if that feedback helps you out at all or if you need any additional assistance.
Regards,
Dan Nedelko
Links:
Scott G.
VP, Product Management at Citypath.com
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It depends on what those child sites are and what your future plans may be regarding things like languages, localization, etc. Would you ever need to sell one of the sub-domain products as a carved out business?
From a user perspective, when navigating within your site no one is likely to even notice what's changing in the URL. IF they're navigating via menus, etc. it's just all content to them. And, as has been mentioned, you can do both if you'd want to in terms of branding, but then you have more complexities in terms of some of the benefits of using sub-domains.
There's other UX/Build issues to consider. Site Search. Search is a critical access point even once within a site. What search tech are you going to use internally? Will it matter that sites are on varying domains? It shouldn't. Or at least, a decent enterprise search product should be able to federate results from multiple domains. But it is another issue. Is you dev team prepared to handle multiple domains? What about your CMS? If you CMS is going to run the whole thing, are there shared files? (I.e., if so, is your dev team ready to set up virtual directories properly so files can be called from a common repository for things like common .css file definitions and so on.) None of this is all very hard per se, but it does require some work and good site mapping/management.
As to language and localization, it may already be hard to get your main root domain in multiple countries. For languages, of course, that's a combination of browser setting and making sure your server, databases, other apps, etc. are ready to deliver the target character sets. But the thing is, if you want to localize with varying domains as well, (as opposed to either or both user selection and IP sensing), you'll have to try to buy a lot more international domains as well. (Remember that language delivery and localization really are quite different types of efforts; even though there's commonality in some of the effort.)
Bottom line: Personally, I prefer the multiple domain route. There's a ton more flexibility in terms of what you can do with the site and future potential businesses. There are some issues with doing it that can make it a bit more tricky to manage. (Which means a bit more cost as well.)
The one thing I do know is this. It's not just a This or That answer. It depends on your vision of the future and what you might want to do.
There is a technical difference that I don't see people addressing. Cookies are based on domain, and you can end up with a cookie for site1.foobar.com that is not available to site2.foobar.com. That can be either good or bad, depending on the other differences between the sites. Cookies assigned to .foobar.com should be available to all the subdomains.
Another issue is that https is by domain. If you buy a certificate for https://site1.foobar.com/, it won't work properly for https://site2.foobar.com/. One possibility is to buy the certificate for https://secure.foobar.com/ and only use https for shared content. However, that depends on the nature of your child sites. For something like yahoo.com that works (because most of the data is public). For banking, it wouldn't (because the banking data is private).
From an SEO POV I'd say it depends on how much good, fresh content will be going in to the child sites.
Large volumes of fresh content and I'd say subs, if however the content is lacking, then use folders. My reasoning for this is purely based on link strength/Google PageRank > SEO Traffic. If this isn't a major concern (why the hell isn't it?), then what I stated is irrelevant.
If you'd like a better understanding of this, I can explain further.
Bests,
John
There are a lot of good comments posted already. The only caveat that I would share is that it is a wise idea to host your 3rd level domains on one or more servers that do not resolve to the same gateway IP, if that is in your budget. (This step will give a higher relevancy to the links, if they do not appear to be internally generated.)
To help clarify Matt Fletcher's statement that a certificate won't cover subdomains, that's not a completely accurate statement.
Make sure you purchase the right certificate for the job. You can purchase Wildcard SSL Certificates that will cover all subdomains. These are more expensive, but usually after you purchase two or three for subdomains, you've essentially paid for a Wildcard Certificate. See attached article from GoDaddy for clarification.
Links:
Hi Parry,
my answer is from an SEO perspective.
1. I would do both. Use a sub domain and then a vanity url or marketing url that you promote to your consumer.
2. sub-domains give you the ability to geo-locate and this is key for ranking well. As an example your main domain www.mysite.com could target US consumer but then you create a new site or micro site for UK.
www.mysite.com/uk is geo-located for the US, however if you create uk.mysite.com you can then geo-locate this to the UK or any market that you wish.
3. Link building. Having sub-domains will help you with link building. The only caveat is to make sure that you don't have reciprocal links to the same page.
so: uk.mysite.com links to page B on mysite.com and mysite.com links to page D on uk.mysite.com
4. Make sure content is diff. on your sub-domains however this is not a total requirement as Google knows that many sites are global and they recognize this and won't penalize you for duplicate content.
Richard P.
Software Engineer Team Lead and Web architect/developer/analyst with extensive experience in SEO and affiliate marketing
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Hi Parry,
Some good and bad answers here IMHO :-)
I will give you my advice from an SEO perspective and my advice is don't do both - big no no. For Google this would be risking a duplicate content penalty.
Google see sub domains as separate sites. To confirm this do a search for a site you know has multiple sub domains (maybe a university). What you should see is that site and all the other sites done via sub domains occupying individual results. If Google saw these as all under the same banner of a 'site' then you would generally only see one 1 result and then the link 'click here to see more results'.
With that clarified you now have to consider who will edit the content on these micro sites and what content they will potentially be linking to. The reason for this is that if a sub domain site (site1.xxx) links to some suspect content/site then Google will not penalise your main site or any other sub domain sites. If however a subdirectory site (/site1) links to some suspect content/site then you risk having the whole site and all other subdirectories penalised. Just some food for thought on your part on what control you will have on the content of these sites.
Also consider that with each sub domain as a separate site they will need their own page rank building up. If your main site will link to them then this will pass on its value to all of them.
In terms of branding then I don't really have any issue with either. The trouble with many sub domains is that you will still get people manually enter the www. before a sub domain. Its just a habit for non technical minded people. You just need to technically cater for this on your web server and setup a redirect.
Good luck with it all.
Rich.
p.s. See Matt Cutts response to this common question (link)
Links:
Lou S.
Freelance, Full Service Internet Marketing and Website Project Management
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Derek is exactly right: Branding.
You can do both - google.com/maps OR maps.google.com
Just have your index page redirect to the subdomain
Ok, after that consideration, If I had to choose, I would choose subdomain since you can put a descriptive word as the subdomain and it doesn't necessarily have to coincide with the folder name. You can have antiquetables.furniture.com and have the folder a few deep in the taxonomy like furniture_types/tables/antiques.
It says more to have a subdomain - especially on printed material or online ads.
Theo A.
Technical Account Engineer at Oberthur Technologies
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Hi Perry,
For my web sites, I'm using both.
I prefer the usage of sub-domains, when the child sites are completely independent from each other (e.g. users or departments having their own page).
When the child sites link to each other, then I prefer the usage of sub-directories, because the sub-dirs (directly) indicate that the child sites are related to each other.
It's about the main topic/content.
It the topics/content differ as theme, use:
e-commerce.foobar.com
dating.foobar.com
If the topic it's the same, use:
foobar.com/products
foobar.com/companies
Otherwise search engines will punish the inadeqvate usage of subdomains.
In my opinion, in your case it's ok to use subdomains, since there each 'site' it's supposing to be distinct as topic/content/owner.
Do both, man. This is 2008 ;)
