What are Subdomains and How do They Affect SEO?

When it comes to SEO, most of the folks want to know, what is good and what not worth at all. And apparently, there are a lot of myths goes around with a number of SEO related queries. Do you know What are Subdomains and how they affect SEO?

Yeah, this is one of the most discussed topics amongst is whether subdomains affect SEO positively or negatively?

The Internet world is stuffed with unique domain names with multiple TLD’s, and in addition, subdomains can raise the confusions.

Before getting into the topic, how subdomains affect the SEO positively or negatively, it’s important to know what exactly sub domain is. What it is mURL of the meant for, in fact why it is in existence in the SEO industry at all.

What are subdomains?

In simple words, subdomains are just a hierarchy of the internet, to simplify the browsing experience.

In other words, a subdomain is part of your website but separated from the existing sitemap without any unique URLs.

In earlier days if a user has to visit a webpage, they have to input a series of a number like 45.35.361.24 in the browser to access a particular webpage.

And if the user is not so precise with those numbers, then it’s a nightmare for them to view a particular webpage, as ever page are unique. And that’s common, as the numbers are never been easy to memorize.

Thanks to the DNS(Domain Naming System) being a part of the internet. It solves the whole thing and makes it so convenient. Example, questioncage.com. In Fact any Top Level Domain (TLD’s)

For Instance, a subdomain would look alike,

blog.questioncage.com or info.questioncage.com, something just like that.

Why Do People Use Subdomains

It tends to be that a subdomain could get ranked quickly, when it compared to, with the actual URL of the website.

As it been said that, a subdomain of the website is considered as a separate entity in the search engines. Thus, knowing to this fact it’s quite easier for the large website to choose it.

The websites which have a large section of their blog and E-commerce too along with their main website.

Now, people separate those section for the better user experience, and also it’s easily manageable as the whole websites get multi categorized.

Here is an example of the same for better understanding, what Moz says about ccTLDs, subdirectories, and subdomains.

cctlds moz
Source: Moz

And also helps out establish a reputation authority in a particular niche which apparently helps out boosting the main URL.

Segregate E-Commerce or blog from the Actual website

A large scaled website or blog can be separated through the Subdomains, as it grows.

It can be considered as a wise decision altogether if the main(money) website and other web pages like the blog have their own purposes.

Although, you might have already seen larger websites following such strategies.

Use Subdomains system to create a mobile site

The mobile users are growing quite rapidly and most of the webmaster are all set to optimize their website for them.

You might have already observed, many of the websites create a completely separate site for the mobile users adding an “m” before the website name.

For instance, this site normal URL questioncage.com, and if that additional subdomain added to the website to make it more mobile friendly, it would be m.questioncage.com

Doing this the site will be completely ultra responsive and will be adaptive in any screen size and one of the parts of Mobile SEO and to improve rankings.

Nothing to be done, in your side to scale the content for respective screen sizes at all. It will automatically determine the screen size and serve the users accordingly.

Take a look at what ex-Googler Vanessa Fox said,

Google is no longer treating subdomains (blog.mywebsite.com versus mywebsite.com) independently, instead of attaching some association between them. The ranking algorithms have been tweaked so that pages from multiple subdomains have a much higher relevance bar to clear in order to be shown.

Conclusion on Subdomains Importance

Although on the other hand search engine Giant like Google, already admitted several times that subdomains won’t do good or bad at all. It’s all about personal preference.

Check out what Matt Cutt’s says about,

But, as said above, it’s useful for a larger size website to enhance the overall user experience, and as we all know user experience is one of the major Google ranking factors.

I am sure by the end of it, now you understood pretty well, what are subdomains exactly and why it had to relate with SEO at all.

2 thoughts on “What are Subdomains and How do They Affect SEO?”

  1. Dear Rao

    Thank you for writing all this detailed blog.
    I have a question. I have a website let say abc.com & now I got an exact match domain xyz.com.
    i wanted to shift abc to xyz. Although abc is already ranking high. But somehow I wanted to shuffle all my stuff to exact macthed one.

    How I can do this?
    Thanks & Regards

    PS: Check if you mis-spelled “Sum domain is” or it is OK.

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