SEO: Subdomain vs folders

[yacpro13]

Hello,

here's our situation:We have an ecommerce website, say www.example.com. For support, we use zendesk which offers a great platform that makes publishing FAQ and various resource articles very easy.

We're torn between publishing these articles on our actual website, or publishing them via Zendesk.

If we publish them on our website, the url would be something like:
www.example.com/articles/title_article.html

On the other hand, if we publish them via zendesk, the url would look like:
support.example.com/articles/title_of_article

We would like to publish them via Zendesk, however, we do no want to miss out on any SEO benefit, however marginal it may be. Doing it this way, the domain would have all of the ecommerce pages (product and category pages), and the subdomain would have ALL other types of pages (help articles and also policies, such as return policies, shipping info, etc etc).

I know a long time ago, folders were preferred over subdomains for SEO, but things change all the time.Do you think setting up all the ecommerce pages on the domain, and all content pages on the subdomain, would be a lesser solution?

Thanks.

[MoosaHemani]

According to the graph available here http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/08/reorganizing-internal-vs-external.html Google shows the re organization of external and internal links!

According to that Google is now considering sub domain as part of the website instead of considering as a separate domain.

Keeping that in mind, I believe subdomain will fine too!!

[dotfly]

some time ago Google equalised subdomains and subfolders - officially... the differences are marginal but they exist and I will tell you a few which you can think about ... maybe this will help your for your decision.

In the first place Google regards a subdomain as a separate domain within such a theoretical scenario: you can get up to 2 listings within the serps for one keyword with one domain. Using a subdomain multiplies this possibility (I`ve seen examples where a single subdomain had 5 listings + 2 from the main domain)... so this is a factor which can have an effect on the traffic.

Another aspect are penalties. If you get a penalty on a subdomain, there is a very big chance that the main domain is not affected. By the way: this process is NOT reversible!

Furthermore, if you use sudomains it`s much more easier to control htaccess (e.g. mod rewrite)

Using subfolders is often much more easier to handle for webmasters but that can`t be seen as "across-the-board".

The main argument you will get to hear about using subfolders is that they get trust from the main website. There is no evidence that this is an advantage of subfolders. Subfolders and subdomains need links from other sides to establish their ranking!

So if the content you would like to separate has less in common with the content of the main domain you should think about the option to use subdomains.

[yacpro13]

Thanks guys.

This is the answer I was hoping for.