Jill Whalen answers some SEO related questions in SEL Blog. My favorite is about choosing between a sub-domain or sub-directory for your company blog:
Question: Should I put my blog in a sub-directory, a subdomain or on its own domain?
Jill: It depends on: whether you want to brand the blog as part of your main website or brand it as a separate entity, and whether you want people to be able to easily remember the URL.
The quick answer: Whether it’s in a sub-directory or subdomain doesn’t make too much difference, although if it’s in a subdomain you may have more chance of it showing up in the search results at the same time that your main domain also shows up, than if it’s in a sub-directory. On the other hand, the average person doesn’t think to type in subdomains if they’re trying to go directly to your site and are more likely to remember something like yourdomain.com/blog than blog.yourdomain.com. For SEO purposes, none of these things really matter, so it’s more of a business/branding decision.
fletchgqc adds: It does have some SEO importance since a subdomain is a separate domain? If you have a lot of links coming into your blog posts, wouldn’t that give authority to your domain as a whole and therefore vouch for having your blog as a sub-folder? Alternatively if you have heaps of outgoing links from your blog and not much coming in it might be better to have it as a subdomain. That was running through my head recently but I don’t really know the answers so please feel free to enlighten me.
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/internet/subdomain-or-subdirectory-for-blog/7152/
Tags: inspiration, seo, Internet
Reader Comments
I did experiment for the same and here is the summary of my observation:
Advantage of Subdomains over Subdirectory:
Subdomain is a clean structure from user’s perspective than subdirectories.
Subdomain can be changed to any subdirectory within the site, without end user knowing it. This may also be true for subdirectory but advanced knowledge on domain forwarding or familiarity with .htaccess file is required.
Subdomain may be point to a different website using forward.
Advantage of Subdirectory over Subdomains:
Subdirectories are simple to manage and nothing specific has to be done while adding new subdirectory unless you wanted a wrapper to hide your true subdirectory.
Subdirectories might provide faster performance over subdomains because subdomains may be hosted in different IP and it has to be resolved runtime.
Please see more about my experiment at this location. Please feel free to ask me any question.
link
Regards,
saching
Written by sachin on 02.10.09