I’ve researched this a fair bit. Supposedly, using a subdomain for a part of a site (sub.domain.tld) harms it’s SEO in comparison to simply using a subdirectory of a site (domain.tld/sub).
Does anyone have any input on this? I guess that subdirectories appear to be better off as they’re perceived as part of the same site, whereas a subdomain is perceived to be an entirely different site?
I guess personal preference plays into this too.
A subdomain is mostly considered as another website, you can even have an entire different server/IP for it.
The owner of a2hosting is quite a nerd when it comes to SEO, and looking at his practices, you can see that he has most things that have content on the root domain, even the blog under ‘/blog’ and knowledgebase under ‘/kb’ and not in another subdomain.
That’s my take on it 
It doesn’t harm your website, it just doesn’t create extra ‘juice’.
That’s what I thought. I’m currently working on a knowledge base which is why I wanted to ask Thanks for the information!
I’ve found that having your documentation on a sub-domain, just like most companies do, is quite efficient for SEO; it definitely provides ‘juice’, but it’s hard to say how much compared to a directory.
It’s also more aesthetically pleasing for your users and visitors to have it like this.
You think? I was originally going to go with a subdomain, but a subdirectory made more sense considering that visually, the site adheres to the same styling as the root site.
According to Google it does not matter.
Google is smart enough to understand the connection.
You guys might want to take a look at the new Google Web Series.
Thanks for the source! I’ll definitely check that out
As long as you make it easy to get back to your main domain… If I have to delete crap off both ends of the URL I’m not very pleased. I prefer sub-directory for that reason 
Thanks for the input As both sites will utilize the same styling etc. I’ve decided to use a subdirectory as opposed to a subdomain.
If you’re building up a single domain, you generally want to keep as much content on that single domain as possible. The more you split it across subdomains the harder it is to build up one (sub)domain’s authority. Same goes for www/non-www and http/https - pick one and stick to it for the main site and correctly 301 the others, try not to change it going forward if at all possible.
Absolutely. All of my sites redirect to HTTPS anyway I was originally going to split the majority of the site’s segments into subdomains, but decided that it would end up being such a pointless endeavour. I like keeping control panels on subdomains though.
Subdomains gives an additional “layer” of security, specially if using another server in that subdomain or something like CageFS. Is important that you don’t mix client billing area/space with blogs or other systems.
Let say you have this wordpress blog running in your root but in a subdirectory (/blog). Then you have your client area (WHMCS) on /clientarea , if that wordpress gets compromised your clientarea might as well be fucked up too.
Is probably obvious but just saying, don’t do stupid shit for SEO.
I would never put WordPress and WHMCS on the same hosting platform. I have WHMCS in its own KVM VPS, on a separate subdomain and that should be the norm.
God bless you young man.
Likewise, I would never mix two things like that haha. Hence why my company control panel is on it’s own subdomain.
It’s like some of you guys have never heard of reverse proxies, lol
That’s true. The thought hadn’t even crossed my mind haha. I guess that makes it pretty much purely down to choice
