Host name per content

[HispaZone]

Hello everyone.

I'm in charge of the website HispaZone.com in which apart from many other things we provide free program downloads in spanish in a similar way to softpedia, tucows, cnet, softonic and others.

I'm not a great SEO but I try to do my best. Several months ago based on my most important competence (softonic.com and uptodown.com) I decided that I would give a host name under the domain hispazone.com for the landing page of each program download. For downloading Nero for example the landing page would be http://nero.hispazone.com and like this for the whole of our 800 program database.

The thing is that after 5-6 months since that change and after many other improvements, the traffic coming from google to these downloads dropped dramatically. We thought it could have been related to Google Panda but we recently hired an SEO consultant and he says that it's because of not having the downloads under the same host name. That we lose the page authority and the link flow from the hostname http://www.hispazone.com.

The SEO consultant seems to be great, very up to date with all new changes in google. We made many improvements thanks to him and I can say that I trust him with everything. But now comes the time for deciding if we move our program download landing pages back to the www.hispazone.com hostname.

I would like some second opinion about this because the fact that the biggest ones in Spain like Softonic and Uptodown have a hostname  for each program download when these companies invest really a lot in their SEO makes me be unsure of going back into having all under the same hostname.

Thanks a lot.

[Hannah_Smith]

Hi Mikel,

I'd concur with your SEO consultant's view

The subdomain set up (i.e. http://nero.hispazone.com) is sub-optimal as the search engines essentially see subdomains as individual sites - so any strength or authority you have from hispazone.com is not passed to nero.hispazone.com.

I think you're saying that you've been recommended to go down the subfolder route - i.e. hispazone.com/nero - if so I think this is a better solution for you as any strength or authority you have from hispazone.com is passed to hispazone.com/nero.

The subdomain route can of course work, but in order to rank well you'd need to build links to each subdomain as if they were separate sites - which is of course pretty resource intensive.

I hope this helps,

Hannah