Are Subdomains Bad for SEO?
If you are like many dedicated webmasters, you may have considered transitioning content such as a blog to a subdomain of your primary website. This may seem like a simple and easy way to consolidate existing content, but too many subdomains can have a negative effect on the search engine rank of your primary domain.
For example, if you have high-quality content on your primary domain that has a large readership, transitioning this content to a subdomain can cause your website’s rank to fall rapidly. It is highly recommended that you do not move any of your most successful content away from your primary domain. In most cases, utilizing subdomains is harmful for SEO purposes.
When a Subdomain Makes Sense
However, there are some cases in which using subdomains can improve your search engine rank. If you have an established website that has existed long enough to create a large amount of content, you may be able to use subdomains to prevent some of your less successful articles from lowering your search engine rank. A low-quality article such as a reproduced how-to guide, for example, can prevent your website and its high-quality articles from receiving the attention that it deserves. An alternative to removing these poor SEO articles is to transition them to subdomains. This will ensure that Google’s algorithms do not identify your entire primary domain as low-quality and harm your search engine rank.
Advice from Our SEO Experts
Outside of the above method of deflecting search engines’ attention from low-quality articles, the use of subdomains should be avoided. Instead, you should make use of subfolders for blogs and other related content. Unlike subdomains, subfolders always take the rank and credibility of your primary site. This also works the other way around; the rank and credibility created by subfolders is passed on to other aspects of the primary site.
As with many things, subdomains are not always bad for search engine optimization, but they should be used sparingly with a particular purpose in mind. Have other questions about search engine optimization? Call (858) 277-1717 and request a complimentary, no-obligation consultation with a professional San Diego internet marketing expert from Saba, Inc. and find out how to maximize your potential in the online world.