What’s better for SEO: subdomain, sub­dir­ect­ory or a new domain?

If you want to modify the structure of your website, you can go with a straight­for­ward solution like a subdomain or a sub­dir­ect­ory. You can also , however, opt to create an entirely new domain. In addition to their struc­tur­al dif­fer­ences, each option also has a different effect on search engine op­tim­isa­tion measures.

A quick com­par­is­on of sub­dir­ect­or­ies, sub­do­mains and new domains

Sub­dir­ect­or­ies vs. sub­do­mains vs. new domains—Which one is right for you?

If the content you want to create is them­at­ic­ally similar to the content you already have on your website, you can often in­cor­por­ate the new content using a sub­dir­ect­ory or a subdomain. For example, if you have a celebrity blog and want to create content about the star’s spouse, either one of these options would be suitable.

For content about other topics (e.g., posts about different celebrit­ies that have no con­nec­tion to the celebrity that your blog focuses on), it may be necessary to go a com­pletely new direction with the website. For instance, instead of focusing on one par­tic­u­lar actor or musician, it may be a good idea to cover the lives and careers of many different celebrit­ies.

What follows is a site that is more geared towards celebrity news rather than a portal that focuses ex­clus­ively on the life of one celebrity. Making this change, however, can be tricky if the current address for the website contains the name of the celebrity. In such cases, a com­pletely new domain is often the best solution.

What are the pros and cons of sub­dir­ect­or­ies, sub­do­mains and new domains?

Which of these options is most suitable for you depends entirely on the direction of your new content. Ad­di­tion­ally, the option you choose will also have an effect on the search engine ranking of your website. Below we’ve sum­mar­ised the functions and dis­tinct­ive features of each of these ap­proaches as well as when they should ideally be used.

Pros and cons of sub­dir­ect­or­ies

A URL directory defines the structure of a website and is sub­divided into different sub­dir­ect­or­ies that are connected to the domain. For an e-commerce platform, a sub­dir­ect­ory may look something like this: example.com/shop. If the platform features products from different man­u­fac­tur­ers, it may be useful to create subpages for each man­u­fac­turer. This can be done with the help of further sub­dir­ect­or­ies (example.com/shop/manufacturer1, example.com/shop/manufacturer2, etc.). The technical im­ple­ment­a­tion is, in contrast to a subdomain, rather simple.

In order to ensure that the sub­dir­ect­or­ies are optimised for search engines, it’s important that the sub­dir­ect­or­ies are named in a manner that reflects the content on the webpage. Similar to sub­do­mains, you should aim to use a keyword when naming a sub­dir­ect­ory. Not only is this important from an SEO per­spect­ive, it also enhances the trans­par­ency of a website. If the landing page for a business’ website doesn’t clearly display the company’s name, the site can seem un­pro­fes­sion­al. A sig­ni­fic­ant SEO benefit of using sub­dir­ect­or­ies is that their ranking is in­flu­enced by the quality of content and the link power of the root domain.

Pros and cons of sub­do­mains

A subdomain is a domain that’s part of a larger domain. When dis­cuss­ing the structure of a website, the term third-level domain is commonly used to refer to sub­do­mains. If, for example, a person wants to set up an e-commerce platform under the domain, www.example.com, they can choose the subdomain shop.example.com.

Sub­do­mains are es­pe­cially useful if:

• you want to offer content in different languages (for example, en.example.com for English and es.example.com for Spanish).
• there are many different topics on a site that all share a common theme (flightprices.example.com vs. busprices.example.com).
• you want to highlight different products, companies or brands (company1.example.com, company2.example.com).

Manually setting up a subdomain is a complex task. While subdomain plugins exist for many content man­age­ment systems, the process of setting them up requires multiple steps. In addition to modifying the web server settings, you also need to have wildcards set up to use a subdomain plugin. These steps alone are enough to deter many non-experts. Some web hosting services, however, offer support or sim­pli­fied processes for setting up sub­do­mains. In terms of SEO, sub­do­mains come with the added advantage that they can appear in search engine results separate from the main domain.

Pros and cons of new domains/websites

For site operators that want to expand their content beyond what the name of their current domain implies,a domain change may be the easiest solution. This option also allows you to keep the website you already have as its own entity. In the example with the celebrity blog, it would be necessary to register a new domain if the blog’s address refers to a specific person and you want to feature other topics on the site. This means that creating a new address with a name that hints at the site’s new direction.

If the planned content differs sig­ni­fic­antly from the other topics on your site and you still want to preserve the look and feel of it, it may be best to set up a com­pletely new platform for the content. If this is the case, you’ll need to create a new domain.

Setting up a new domain or a new website comes with ad­di­tion­al costs though. One of the biggest dis­ad­vant­ages of creating a new website is the amount of work involved. You need to start from the beginning and come up with a concept, set up the website and then test it. What’s more, once the site goes live, it will be another web presence that requires ad­min­is­trat­ive upkeep.

New websites or domains can, however, be useful in cases where the previous site has ex­per­i­enced repu­ta­tion­al damage. It doesn’t matter if the damage was caused by external factors or self-imposed.