Subdomains or sub-folders which is better for search engine optimization? SEO tip - Monday - feb 21 2005

Sub-domains or sub-folders for search engines, This has been an important questions among forums,

In our point of view to build a big quality site sub folders are better, search engines usually treat sub domains as different sites, Subdomains and subfolders use completely different standards,



A subdomain acts as a different site, places where sub domains are useful,

1. Say suppose you want to start a site completely unrelated to your existing site, but you dont want to buy new hosting or use some other domain, that time subdomains serve a very good purpose, if your site is real-estate.yourbrand.com then you can start a completely different topic site saying cosmetics.yourbrand.com here real estate site will talk about real estate and cosmetics will talk about cosmetic items,

2. Also if you are a free hosting provider it is will be costly process to give away domain hosting, so lots of free hosting companies give sub domain hosting, some sites like freeservers, netfirms, tripod etc give free sub domains, since sub domains are treated completely different sites people can use it freely without any problems,.

3. If your organization is an affiliate, subsidiary, or chapter of a national or international organization, you might ask the headquarters if you can get a subdomain within the organization's domain; if you can, this would save you the InterNIC registration fee (subdomains don't cost anything to register) as well as give your organization an address that indicates its affiliation.

4. One more thing to note is that, if you use cookies in your site, they only work within one domain. For security and privacy purposes, browsers will not transmit cookies to any site in a different domain from the one that set the cookie. They can be shared across subdomains and hosts within a domain, but not from one domain to another.

5. Subdomains is appropriate, especially if you have a domain name that has a high level of brand recognition, For example sites like google, excite, yahoo etc use subdomains to show diversity among their sites,



subfolders are always considered part of a site,

For example



here there are two subfolders, Both those subfolders talk completely about different topics, research subfolder talks about all research done by google, their research materials etc,

Services subfolder talks about all services provided by google.com, those they talk about completely different areas they virtually stay on the same site, So they literally belong to the same site, this type of division helps identify a site being an authority,

For better search engine ranking and becoming an authority site in search engines we recommend using subfolders than sub domains, Some major disadvantage of sub domains are subdomains are subject to a lot of spamming, Lots of spammers create 100s of subdomains for lots of keywords and just manipulate the search engine results,

because of this search engines frown upon these type of sites slightly, So better go for subfolders if you want to run a quality site,

SEO Blog Team,