What would you do if a site's entire content is on a subdomain?

[Kerry22]

Scenario:

1. There is a website called mydomain.com and it is a new domain with about 300 inbound links  (some going to the product pages and categories), but they have some high trust links
2. The website has categories a, b, c etc but they are all on a subdomain so instead of being mydomain.com/categoryA/productname the entire site's structure looks like subdomain.mydomain.com/categoryA/productname
3. Would you go to the effort of 301ing the subdomain urls to the correct url structure of mydomain.com/category/product name, or would you leave it as it is?

Just interested as to the extent of the issues this could cause in the future and if this is something worth resolving sooner than later.

[stefanok]

Hi there,

So just to make sure. The structure would be as follows:

shop.mydomain.com/categoryA/productname

shop.mydomain.com/categoryB/productname1

???

[sesertin]

Great question Kerry,

A great factor is how many subdomains do you exactly have. If not above 50 I think interlinking the content well should be enough. There are sites that use lots of subs and are succesful (look at cragslist.org for example). If you have a lot more subdomians I would further investigate the links: how many do exactly go to subdomians. Cause if you redirect only these links will no longer provide about 10-15% of the link juice they do provide now. You can estimate the ratio of the fallback.

Hope I could give you some points to consider, regretfully making a decision you are facing now is never easy. I hope you will be able to solve the problem.

[EGOL]

Here is what I would (probably) do.....

If there is just one subdomain... I would 301 redirect it to the root domain.

If there are multiple subdomains.... I would redirect each of them to a folder.

I would then try to get the links changed to directly hit the proper content in the proper folder.

[sesertin]

That is the best answer, you are right. Maybe I would first contact the sites that link to mine.

[Kerry22]

Yes,exactly that structure

[Kerry22]

Thanks for suggestions, appreciated!