Subdomain and Domain Linking Strategy

[masonwong]

Here is my question for SEO.

We are a mug printing company and we have a website specifically for bulk orders hosted at our main link (example.com). For the purposes of this example we will assume that we only print mugs for bands. Eg. orders for 100 mugs at a time for a band.

We have had a need to create stores for bands so that they can then pass a link to their fans to purchase mugs.

Our main website deals specifically with bulk orders only with customer provided logos, so extending this workflow to our main domain takes quite a bit of development time. Because of this, we purchased a service that allows us to create stores under the new domain stores.example.com. The root domain is the same as our main domain but there is “stores” in front of the domain. A band’s website that we would create  would then look something like : stores.example.com/band1_merchandise

These links are going to be spread by the band all over the web, and it is in my hope to be able to take advantage of this. Ideally stores.example.com/band1_merchandise being spread around will also give us a boost to www.example.com

My question is how can we benefit the most from bands sharing the subdomain link such that our main website will be able to see an SEO benefit.

[BlueprintMarketing]

Use a system like Fastly.com to quickly and easily easily use the reverse proxy to you make your subdomains into sub folders. So

shop.

Becomes

/shop

you can do this using Fastly or “CloudFlare workers” can do it or other reverse proxies you can simply create the subdomains as you have been doing and then we route them through the reverse proxy to a sub folder it will not be hard work once it’s installed.

outside of doing that interlinking and using canonicals but you’re never going to actually catch up to using some folders unless you institute a reverse proxy

https://twitter.com/randfish/status/955933680416931840?s=21

look at The first response from Rand

https://moz.com/community/q/the-great-subdomain-vs-subfolder-debate-what-is-the-best-answer

https://www.portent.com/blog/seo/subdirectories-vs-subdomains-for-2019-and-beyond.htm

my friend John has a lot of good examples

https://www.getcredo.com/subdomain-vs-subdirectory-whats-best-for-seo/

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/subdomains-vs-subfolders-seo/239795/

https://blog.cloudflare.com/subdomains-vs-subdirectories-best-practices-workers-part-1/

Hope I was of help, TOM