Subdirectory vs. Subdomain

[Glassdoctordfw]

I work for a large franchise organization that is weighing the pros and cons of using subdomains versus subdirectories for our franchisee locations. What are the pros and cons of each approach?

[MattAntonino]

As far as I understand, subdomains are good when you want each subdomain judged on its own merit.  For instance, Wordpress uses me.wordpress.com and you.wordpress.com  That means my site may not bring everyone down if I get penalized.  However, if you had wordpress.com/me and wordpress.com/you, we're on the same domain so you'd find it harder to improve your own SEO while I am bringing you down.

So if you're trying to separate content, use subdomains.  If it's all one company/organization and you are confident all franchisees will do the right thing, use subfolders.  If you wanted say

Atlanta.franchise.com

Boston.franchise.com

The SEO work would be 2x (or 50x if you had 50 franchises) but it would stand alone.  That means if the Boston Franchise did a lot of work, they'd be much better off than the ATL one who did less.  If the main franchise.com is doing all the seo for everyone, you'll want to use subfolders.

At least that's my understanding of the difference!  

[NakulGoyal]

For a franchise scenario, it would be best to use a sub-domain, however it does depend on other things as well.

1. Would franchises be able to control / add / edit any content on these sites ?
2. Any duplicate content issues between multiple sites ?
3. Do all of them need to be indexed in the search engines and getting/targetting search traffic ?

As a general rule, for SEO, sub-folders are much better, but in your scenario, it's a different case.

You might also want to refer to other similar questions here on SEOMOZ.

1. http://www.seomoz.org/q/blogs-are-best-when-hosted-on-domain-subdomain-or
2. http://www.seomoz.org/q/setting-up-a-company-blog-subdomain-or-new-url
3. http://www.seomoz.org/q/blog-vs-blog

and the post from Matt Cutts

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/

[JaredMumford]

Great points here by both Matt and Nakul. Of particular importance is understanding who will have access to edit, and site duplication. If you want each of your franchise owners to have editing capabilities for the own store, then it may be easier to use subdomains from a permissions perspective.

As for duplicate content, you'll need to worry about that regardless of whether you use a sub or a folder.

As a case study, Ive worked two very large projects like this, and in both cases I used subfolders for the locations. The folders were the city name in both cases. Each location is positioned position 1 or 2 across the board, and each location shows well in the map packs.

[Glassdoctordfw]

Nakul,

Thank you for your reply!

Answer to your questions:

1. Franchisees could request changes through corporate that would have to be approved and implemented by corporate website manager.

2. It would be difficult to create and manage content for 250+ locations and not have duplicate content. I believe we will have a significant amount of duplicate content except for city name.

3. We would like main site to rank well for non geo specific search "product" and franchise content to rank well for geo specific search "product dallas"

I would appreciate your response based on these clarifications!

thanks!

[Glassdoctordfw]

Jared,

Can you give me examples of franchises you know that rank well using this method?

thanks!

LP

[JaredMumford]

Sure - I dont like giving out my own clients here, but a quick search for say, Seattle Hotels, a very competitive niche, shows the following:

#3 just under tripadvisor and expedia: http://www.starwoodhotels.com/whotels/property/overview/index.html?propertyID=1154

#4 (and #1 in map pack): http://www.fairmont.com/seattle/

These hotels may or may not be franchises, but the business model makes no difference to Google.  The important thing is that these two sites are both ranking in various cities for " <city>hotels". Each uses a slightly different technique (starwood using a subfolder that uses dynamic property ID urls, and fairmont that simply uses a subfolder.</city>

[BethA]

As far as the post-panda world goes, I found this post to be helpful for both beginner and advanced SEOs alike: http://www.whitefireseo.com/site-architecture/subdomain-or-subfolder-post-panda/360/