Comments on: Does Switching From a Subdomain to a Subfolder Improve SEO? Case Studies & Experts RoundUp

By: Ryan Henry

Ryan Henry — Fri, 30 Aug 2019 19:26:35 +0000

We have seen a number of clients try and run a well optimized blog on a sub-domain with very little traffic impact. Once the content was moved over to the main domain in a sub-folder the traffic took off. I have seen this many times over the years for small companies, start-ups and Fortune 100 brands. sub-domain < sub-folder.

By: Mike

Mike — Sat, 05 Jan 2019 01:10:20 +0000

We use Freshdesk for our knowledgebase and support site. They allow subdomains like support.mysite.com but not sub folders like mysite.com/support. My SEO guy has been begging me for years to get our knowledge base content into a sub folder for authority purposes. There just doesn’t seem to be any way to get content from 3rd party hosted services into subfolders short of writing a scraper to recreate static pages in a sub folder. It seems like a ton of work and I can’t find an authoritative source to say it’s going to be worth it.

By: Adrian Cojocariu

Adrian Cojocariu — Thu, 27 Sep 2018 09:15:01 +0000

Hey there! Glad you asked.

In my opinion, if the traffic is good and the positions overall are towards the top, I would avoid moving it to a subfolder.

However, if you have the time, you can try and isolate this by replicating some poor performing forum pages as plain HTML files under subfolder URL and adding the proper 301 redirects to those.

Start with 10-20 to see if there are any changes and decide from there if it’s worth it.

By: Olivier

Olivier — Wed, 26 Sep 2018 23:37:43 +0000

Hi, first of all thanks for this very interesting article.

Let me introduce on of my issue.

I have one french main domain mywebsite.com which is pretty good in term of SEO (news website with about 70K articles)… When I created the website about 14 years ago… I did create some subfolders… Let’s talk about the bigest one : my forum which is under forum.mywebsite.com (about 50K threads)

This subdomain is also good in terme of seo.. traffic coming from the search engines is about half/half between the main domain and the subdomain.

I have decide to move my forum subdomain from http to https… I have planed to do all the proper 301 redirects etc… but my question is:

Should I take the opportunity of this http to https move to also move the forum from its historical subdomain name to a subfolder on the main domain name

What do you think ? Thanks for you help on this

Olivier

By: Thomas Greenbank

Thomas Greenbank — Mon, 09 Jul 2018 03:22:32 +0000

I’m thinking of consolidating a few niche sites into my main site. Should I copy all the content into sub domains or folders?

By: Adrian Cojocariu

Adrian Cojocariu — Fri, 12 Jan 2018 13:50:55 +0000

Thank you for backing up this idea with your experience, Sarah!

By: Adrian Cojocariu

Adrian Cojocariu — Fri, 12 Jan 2018 13:48:37 +0000

I understand the issue now. For the first case, I can see what it would make sense. You could also keep the relevant topics on the main domain and only move the general ones. But yes, it does make sense what you are saying. The bounce rates are relative to the articles though. You can make improvements in reducing those even if the products aren’t related specifically to the article’s topic.

That’s what I was asking. Do you need the main site to rank? Or is it enough for the subdomain blog to rank? If you need the blog to rank, then you can try moving the blog to root to improve its overall authority. There are risks but it’s worth a try if you need the main domain ranking. Thing is, you can always switch back to the previous state. Just make sure you properly redirect.

Thanks for the support, No Pork Pies 😀 !

By: Sarah Mackenzie

Sarah Mackenzie — Wed, 10 Jan 2018 14:21:42 +0000

Great summary! Of course, it always depends on each website’s specific server configuration and brand/user experience.

My general experience is that Google sees content on subdomains as separate than the main domain. One isn’t “better” than the other – they’re just kinda separate websites.

Sometimes, having two separate websites isn’t as powerful as consolidating content and incoming links into a single destination. If you have a subdomain with few incoming links, then it could have trouble driving traffic. Moving the content to a (properly linked) subdirectory on a more powerful main domain could help.

I’ve helped several clients move their blog from a subdomain to a main domain, and seen total traffic rise significantly. However, site moves are nothing to be taken lightly. You need to carefully migrate over content, 301 all URLs on a page-to-page basis, etc. Perhaps that’s why some official lines are that it’s not worth it to move, because people can seriously mess it up. But IMHO, when done right, it’s totally worth it. 😉

By: Uri Binsted

Uri Binsted — Wed, 10 Jan 2018 14:21:07 +0000

Thanks Adrian, it is a new WordPress blog we will be adding to a Magento E-commerce website. No need for 301s.

By: No Pork Pies

No Pork Pies — Wed, 10 Jan 2018 12:24:05 +0000

I agree with you in a general sense but in the case of these two examples the reason the clients aren’t already creating topical content is that they also do a broader magazine and this impacts the very specific topic of their service, as well as having a much higher bounce rate on their blog than they would with a very specific topic. So there is a logical reason to move it, as well as the fact the blog is hosting on a separate site and its kinda been hacked together to get it on the same domain so a sub would also make that easier to manage.

The other site I’m not sure I agree based on the fact the blog ranks well but the main site doesn’t so even if we look at it from a link equity point of view then it makes sense to move it because the main site has very little links due to the natural link development happening on the blog domain.

A really useful article so thanks for your thoughts.