Subdomains - good or bad?

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blatchcorn

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I am reading a lot of mixed messages about whether or not subdomains are good or bad. Can anyone give me some input?

We have a customer support area provided by zendesk, which uses a subdomain. We are considering giving the area its own subfolder to boost the visibility of the long-tail keywords in the support articles.

Any suggestions?
 
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Moz Staff said:
I would still strongly urge folks to keep all content on a single subdomain. We recently were able to test this using a subdomain on Moz itself (when moving our beginner's guide to SEO from guides.moz.com to the current URL http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo). The results were astounding - rankings rose dramatically across the board for every keyword we tracked to the pages.
Click to expand...

http://moz.com/community/q/moz-s-official-stance-on-subdomain-vs-subfolder-does-it-need-updating
 
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I think a /folder gets more authority/"juice" passed from the main domain.
 
Yes checked with trusty Moz but I have also seen articles disagree with this
 
blatchcorn said:
Yes checked with trusty Moz but I have also seen articles disagree with this
Click to expand...

A subdomain is treated almost as a different domain while the /folder is treated as a "part" of the main domain.
 
You'll have to start from scratch if you put your support archives on a subdomain as its considered a brand new domain.

In the long run it might be more beneficial to use a directory on your main domain because your SEO efforts will automatically carry over to your support posts and also give you additional uniqueness overall, but its entirely up to you.

I'd suggest doing http://yourdomain.com/support or something along the lines of that so you can get more traffic and other ranking benefits.
 
Even Google use sub domains but each one goes with a different topic so it's not bad for SEO but it'll build more authority to your site if you have unique content on each sub domain.
 
I would only use a subdomain if the topic isn't related to your main site but some sites do use them for blogs.

Having a subdomain makes it easier to manage your site when you are running separate services such as a django site and wordpress site.
 
Sub_domain is not bad at all.
many popular sites with high pr are using sub_domain. So dont worry.
 
Sub domains are fine, just view them as another domain altogether.
 
Agree with everyone above. Really depends on your use too. I've had clients with subdomain blogs that we were able to leverage for linking (it's more valuable than straight internal linking but less valuable than external site linking....but the primary blog purpose was to push terms there). If you're trying to rank the subdomain or content, having it in a subfolder as others have said does pass the authority of the domain onto the folder. This can also be great if it is a blog you're building and people share/link to articles, this gets you links back to your main domain.
 
I don't say subdomains are bad, but I would not rely on them.
 
It doesn't really matter. You can chose either of the two
 
I suppose it would depend upon the strength of your domain in the genre you wish to rank for with your new pages. If they are in the same genre, then I would avoid the subdomain and just make it a folder within your original domain. However, if the genre is a bit different from your original domain, then a subdomain will separate them in the eyes of the web crawlers.
 
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