Subdomain and root domain

[josh123]

Hey Everyone, our page has multiple domains and I'm wondering how it affects search rankings today. I saw some stuff from almost a year ago, but I'm not sure if something has changed. We currently have our root domain "www.xyz.com" and started moving some pages over to a different sub-domain "web.xyz.com" because of usability and ease of adjusting content. How much will this affect our seo?

Thanks!

[customerparadigm.com]

Sanaa -

Here's a link to a response that I gave to someone asking a similar question (using blog.domain.com vs. www.domain.com/blog).  http://moz.com/community/q/blog-on-subdomain

In a nutshell, though...  Google treats a subdomain as a different entity than your main domain.  My recommendation: put all of your effort into making your one domain as solid as it can be, and use subdirectories instead of subdomains.

This question has been a quite big topic in the past. In general...

blog.mydomain.com --> content on the blog. is treated as a different site, and SEO efforts (content, inbound links, social media) only help the subdomain.

mydomain.com/blog --> subdirectories are usually the way to go.  All of the content, inbound links and social media shares will help build the overall domain authority for you.

My recommendation is to go with the subdirectory (i.e. mydomain.com/blog), and there are a whole lot of articles that back this up:

http://moz.com/community/q/blog-on-subdomain-vs-subdirectory-best-practices

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

http://moz.com/community/q/best-place-for-a-blog-blog-mydomain-com-or-mydomain-com-blog

Hope this helps...
-- Jeff

[josh123]

Thanks for the response Jeff!

So If I used a 301 redirect to send blog.mydomain.com --> mydomain.com/blog would I effectively work around my mistake?

[customerparadigm.com]

Sanaa - Yes, if you move the content over, a 301 redirect would be a good way to go.

However, rather than do a blanket 301 redirect, I'd recommend creating a 301 redirect for all of the pages on the older site to go back to the newer location.

This might take a moment to do, but you should be able to generate a sitemap or list of all of the postings, and then use Excel to create the redirect structure for the blog.mydomain.com and redirect it properly:

Redirect 301 best-post-ever/ http://www.mydomain.com/blog/best-post-ever/

(this would be what you'd put in the .htaccess file.)

If you're a power user in Excel, you can use the concatenate function and the Left and Right functions to build this semi-automatically from a list... especially if you have a lot of fields...

Hope this helps,

• Jeff

[josh123]

Thanks, Jeff!