Do you want to know how subdomains work in SEO? How they can affect your website’s positioning in search engines?
It can be seen from different sources that, for various reasons, using subdomains is generally not recommended. However, this has sometimes led to a stigmatization of subdomains, resulting in statements such as: “a subdomain ranks worse.”
At a general level this is false, although with nuances. As always in SEO, It depends.
Subdomains in themselves are not bad. In fact, in practice, a subdomain works the same as a domain.
In fact, we can observe pages on subdomains that work quite well from an SEO standpoint, such as: developers.google.com; blog.cloudflare.com; historia.nationalgeographic.com.es; aws.amazon.com; or even this very website carlos.sanchezdonate.com and countless other pages. Nevertheless, there can be different reasons for configuring a website with a subdomain, and depending on certain nuances, it may be a good or bad practice.
What is vital to understand is that a subdomain is treated as if it were a different domain (with certain characteristics), so this affects both the good and the bad.
In order to appreciate and understand the differences, I find it appropriate to present several practical scenarios in which subdomains are used, to see to what extent they are advisable or not.
As we can see with National Geographic Historia, or with countless Google domains, or with Amazon’s AWS. On many occasions, product lines are distinguished with such marked differences that they deserve their own website.
There are times when the product is very different from what the main website offers, but the intention is to maintain the connection with the main brand, and even guarantee authority (at the brand level, not SEO). For example, a Google subdomain guarantees that Google is behind that project.
Of these cases, the one that could be more open to debate as to whether it is worthwhile or not is National Geographic, since it is not that different. But in the case of Google or Amazon, we can clearly see that they operate as something so different that, even if they lose the advantage of consolidating all domain strength, they prefer to separate it to gain strength in different products (I accept criticism that https://aws.amazon.com/es/ is not a good SEO example, but not because it is a subdomain).
If your website is about a specific topic and the way you separate content is through different subdomains, what you are doing is dividing all the strength.
There are websites that do this, such as: blog.cloudflare.com, help.ryanair.com, or blog.nh-hoteles.es
This practice is usually not recommended because you distribute the strength across different domains. They function as independent domains. Therefore, if the intention is to work on the blog to improve the positioning of the main website and this is done through a subdomain, an inefficient effort is being made.
On the other hand, while everything discussed is true, there is a video by John Mu from 2017 where he clarifies that the only drawback would be an initial reasonable period for crawling the site and for the search engine to understand it. Contrary to this theory, my experience is that separating these services into different subdomains does not tend to give good results. It is only worth it for certain technical functionalities that are not usually rankable.
When PBNs became fashionable, it also became common to separate different purposes into different websites and URLs.
Just as when building a PBN it is usually advisable that Analytics and the IP are not the same and that one should try to hide that they belong to the same network to make it more effective, doing everything under the same domain is more than suspicious—it is obvious.
On the other hand, more than PBNs, what often happens is that due to a poor interpretation of this practice, there are companies that at the time decided to have each section on different subdomains, a practice that is not very advisable.
A well-known brand’s website took this to the extreme (to try a PBN or who knows) where, from the navigation bar, you accessed: nosotros.dominio.com, careers.dominio.com, blog.dominio.com. Diluting absolutely all the strength into different one-page sites. This is not only a technical headache, but from a positioning standpoint it is a mess that would require migrating everything to a single domain.
To manage multilingual or multiregional sites, although there are successful examples such as Stackoverflow or Wikipedia (which is a separate case, a .org with many nuances).
Let’s summarize by saying that subdomains for language segmentation are an option that, while valid, forgoes the advantages that other options can provide, such as differentiating by subdirectories or by using country-specific domains.
I expand on this topic in these videos:
For a website’s back end such as a client zone, an administration panel, or any feature that is not SEO-relevant, it may be convenient, even for developers, to build these types of applications on completely independent domains for security and performance reasons, since this content will not be rankable.
A clear example can be seen with whatsapp.com and web.whatsapp.com
Let’s remember that in practice each subdomain works like a different domain. This is why companies such as Weebly, Blogspot, or Wix, among others, can offer “free websites” (through subdomains) without harming their own domain.
Since they function as independent pages, there should not be any inherent SEO harm. In reality, the SEO drawbacks of these websites are usually others. In addition to visually dirtying your brand with another company’s name, having a website on this type of platform is very poorly scalable, since neither the domain nor the website belongs to the service user.
If you work in a gray market for advertising, such as a B2B betting company, or a company that trades some type of substance even if everything is legal, advertising can be difficult.
Creating a subdomain with a similar interface without mentioning these products can be a way to set up a valid intermediary as a landing page to advertise in these sectors.
Sometimes a subdomain name can be a better fit than the domain name itself.
You can see the example on this very website. Let’s remember that it will function as an independent generic-level domain.
Having a website on a subdomain does not in itself imply any disadvantage. In my case, for brand image and due to available domains, the option carlos.sanchezdonate.com seemed the most appropriate and elegant. It is also a nice way to show that subdomains should not be feared. They can be worked with easily if you know what you are doing.
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