Impact of subdomains on SEO

[sasglobal]

Hi all,
Can anyone tell me definitively how google looks at a subdomain in terms of SEO? Example, which would rank quicker and higher makemoneyonline.com or makemoneyonline.mysite.com

Thanks

[Nicky Papers]

In most cases, you should be able to rank "makemoneyonline.com" faster and higher than "makemoneyonline.mysite.com". There are other factors that need to be considered such as the domain age / link profile of "mysite", how relevant "makemoneyonline" is to the term "mysite" and of course on-page SEO factors.

In an effort to answer your question, most times Google will value the domain name (when used as an exact match) over the using the term in the subdomain with respect to ranking.

I've found subdomains to be handy for ranking purposes when used to organize content by city (think media / news sites) for ranking terms containing the name of the city.

[jackwebson]

Hi there,


I can say that I've been having a good SEO result on my sub domain website (see my signature). As days go by my site crawls at the top of Google for some competitive keywords related to SEO. I'm actually expecting to be on the first page by the end of this month and I'll surely post it here on WF if it will happen.

Jack

[arnoldsmithh]

makemoneyonline dot com will come first rather than sub-domain.

[David Judge]

I used subomains to assist with ranking other pages, but not to rank directly.

I'm sure it can be done though

[nisha02]

Promote your sub-domain better and it will rank quicker, it all depends on your seo techniques

[jushuaburnham]

Obviously the first one will rank easily, its look more credible than the second.

[JohnRaja]

Thats quite obvious Google gives more importance to domains rather than sub domains..

[NickWatson]

The domain alone will definitely rank easier than the subdomain...

[Stalliontheme]

Google treats sub-domains like a newly registered domain, so there's no difference between say

make-money-online.tld
make.money-online.tld

Everything about the above is identical to Google.

If you own money-online.tld and it already has backlinks you will find it easier to rank content under:

money-online.tld/make/

than under

make.money-online.tld

Because everything on the main domain benefits from link benefit already flowing through the domain. There's a trust factor in domains with aged backlinks. You will have seen sites like Wikipedia where a new page will instantly rank high (within minutes of spidering) even though Google hasn't had the time to determine how much link benefit is flowing to the new page.

The SEO conclusion is if content would work on an existing domain you own, don't put the content on a sub-domain because you'll have to work harder to get the content ranked because the trust factor of the main domain (generated via aged backlinks) won't benefit the sub-domain even if you link to the sub-domain from the main domain.

This is also true for new domains, ideally everything you own would go on one domain. I know this and still own 100 domains and half a dozen sub-domains :-)

David