Pros/Cons on Where to Host Stores for Ecommerce Solution Provider (subdomain vs. throwaway domain, etc)

[andrewmeyer]

Hello! Does anyone have any experience with the pros/cons for where to host storefronts as an ecommerce solution provider. I'm looking for a recommendation on where to house the stores/websites people create with our software (think of us like a shopify/squarespace).

What are the pros & cons of creating stores on the main domain name “brand.com” versus buying a new top level domain name who’s only purpose will be to hold all the subdomains, such as “mybrand.com”, or even “.my.brand.com”.

store.brand.com <— subdomain our our primary domain
store.my.brand.com <— subdomain of a subdomain 
store.mybrand.com <— subdomain of a throw-away domain

Weebly/Squarespace/Tictail go with the first option (store**.weebly.com** and store.squarespace.com). Shopify goes with the 3rd option (store.myshopify.com)

Are there any advantages or disadvantages to one or the other? Am I missing any other options? Thanks in advance!

[MattAntonino]

You should definitely start with an intense discussion we had on Inbound about subdirectories/subfolders. Not because you're asking the subfolder question but rather there's a LOT of really good info about subdomains for SEO.

In general, most people (but not all) agree that subdomains act as their own separate websites. Since all 3 of your options are basically the same (subdomains) then we can just jump ahead a bit.

Choice 2 seems ... redundant ... to me? I don't see the benefit.

Choice 1 vs 3 comes down to do you use your own domain or a throwaway. I would suggest that since you don't know how Google will treat them in the future, a throwaway is probably preferable. I know Wordpress uses a simple subdomain, as did a lot of older CMS' but I think the trend now is to not give Google hardly ANY chance to mess up your SEO by combining it with others. Even though that's not how it seems to currently work, that could change tomorrow. If it's on a separate, throw away domain it really can't be.

The only concern with that is to make sure you don't interlink all your client sites to yours through things like a footer link. You could very quickly and very artificially bank up tons of external links with a simple Theme by Our Company link. It's on a separate domain so those would add up very quickly as external links.

[andrewmeyer]

Thanks for the help here Matt! We've had issues in the past with penalties from unnatural linking networks derived from subdomains, so that will certainly be a focus here. Appreciate it!