Which one is better?

[Beachflower]

I am working on creating new blog. I already had one. I want to add this new topics as subdomain. Now i am confused. Which one will be better for SEO?

subdomain.maysite.com or mysite.com/subdomain

Thanks in advance

[TimHolmes]

This has been banded around so many times, in general I would advocate a sub folder as opposed to sub domain. purely due to the value it adds to your sites main chosen domain, if it were on a sub domain this is where the value would sit and it would not pass any value around as well as it could a sub folder. It is only potentially a small benefit, but a benefit none the less.

A good recent on it was had back on Jan https://moz.com/community/q/the-great-subdomain-vs-subfolder-debate-what-is-the-best-answer

[Vijay-Gaur]

I agree with Tim Holmes, here is a detailed explanation why sub-folder are better than sub-domain now.

• Sub-domains are treated as a  separate entity now, and they don't add to SEO value of the main domain.
• Any links within the subdomain to the main domain are treated as external links.
• Since links are coming from an external domain but the same IP, this may be treated a low-quality backlink for the main domain, though people are divided over this but it can neutral to negative impact instead of being positive. As search engines would consider this as unnatural linking.
• Sub-Folders are treated as part of the domain and pass all the SEO value when connecting internally.

Here is a response from Rand Fishkin to a similar question

Subfolders are the way to go, but they're hard to do for a lot of organizations. Many CMS' (like Hubspot) make it quite challenging to host a Wordpress installation on a subfolder, but subdomains are pretty easy. Hence, when choosing where to host a blog or a separate content section, many folks go with the easier route rather than the one that requires a lot of technical effort and webdev/engineering time.

However, that doesn't mean that they're not losing out - I'd wager that all of those companies would see a bump if they moved their blogs to a subfolder of the same domain. We see this in example after example when sites invest in it, and you can see plenty of folks discussing their own experiences in the comments of the Moz post you linked to.

_Source:  https://www.quora.com/Which-is-best-for-search-engine-optimization-a-blog-subdomain-or-blogging-at-a-blog/answer/Rand-Fishkin?srid=2Gsa_

I hope this helps, feel free to ask further questions and respond to answer.

Regards,

Vijay

[BlueCorona]

This quote is from Moz's domain setup guide:

"Since search engines keep different metrics for domains than they do subdomains, it is recommended that webmasters place link-worthy content like blogs in subfolders rather than subdomains. (i.e. www.example.com/blog/ rather than blog.example.com) The notable exceptions to this are language-specific websites. (i.e., en.example.com for the English version of the website)."

I think that quote is pretty compelling towards the idea of subdirectories. But I think the value of subfolders versus directories certainly makes sense especially from a linking, age, and juice perspective. Ultimately, it comes down to you and what you want for the website.