SEO for Subdomains and subdirectories

Matt Cutts had made this post a year back about the importance of subdomains and subdirectories as far as SEO is concerned and how Google is now treating them.

I felt to cover the same topic after one year of that post to see what the ground reality is. Now it is commonly acknowledged (and you can verify it by searching various webmaster SEO forums) that google still do not treat sub domains as sub directories.

I think right now subdomains falls somewhere in between subdomains of the past and sub directories. Google has certainly taken care of the subdomain spam which probably made them treating subdomains as part of the site since many blackhatters were using subdomains to spam google index as well as many big sites were having multiple entries in google results thanks to their subdomains. But still, subdomains are not treated as part of the sites fully so you should think well before deciding where should you put new part of your website, in a subdirectory or in a subdomain. As far as link juice flow is concerned from main domain to subdomain, it won’t be same as from one domain to another. Ideally you don’t want to think too much about link juice (in that case, you are better of in a subdirectory) as you should focus on Site Architecture. About.com is a good example of site using subdomains well.

You may like read one of my earlier post on When to Build Site on Sub Domains ? to get some ideas of when you should build a site on a subdomain and when on a sub directory.

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