What has a better chance of ranking alongside my main site for my company name, a subdomain or new domain?

[DA2013]

Hi Moz,

Do search engines really treat subdomains as separate domains in this regard? Or are we more likely to get more real estate on the first page with a new domain?

Our goal is to have our main site and this new subdomain or domain ranking in positions 1 and 2 for our company name.

This is going to be a careers site/portal.

Thanks for reading!

[BenjaminEvans]

I don't think subdomains are the way to go. For your brand name, Google is going to naturally show your page in the first few results, unless your brand name is a common term or phase like "Baseball" or "Health Insurance". It used to be that using a subdomain treats it as a different site, or something close to that, but what I have read recently is that subdomains are treated as the same.  At the end of the day, I would keep everything on my root domain in subfolders, therefore building up the power of my core domain at all times.

watch?v=_MswMYk05tk

[irvingw]

Is your company name a very unique name or something generic that a lot of other sites rank for? That makes it either very simple or more difficult depending.

SillySamantha'sCookies.com (easy)

FloridaPaintingContractors.com (more difficult)

I wouldn't do a subdomain or a new domain if you are trying to get #1 and #2 positions for your company name. I would optimize some additional internal pages for your company name on the main site and try to get the homepage and and an internal page ranked in the top two spots.

[JaneCopland]

I think an overall better solution would be to work on developing a strong enough website that the site is given sitelinks, indicating a stronger brand that has extra real estate space at the top of the SERP. With subdomains, you might be able to rank second or third as well and I've definitely seen this happen (although can't replicate it right now). However, Google usually tries to show relatively diverse results, even for company names. You might have trouble ranking content on the same domain, even presented as subdomains, in both top positions. It's more common for Google to pick a social profile, a separate company resource and perhaps a review site for the top results, rather than listing link after link from the same root domain.