Subdomain or Subdirectory?
This topic could be just vague and vast.
Please relate your discussions in terms of SEO, content relevance and why we need a subdomain and subdirectory while hosting a business application.
Thank you.
My rule of thumb.
Use sub directories for everything on same server.
Use sub domains if you use multiple servers.
Either way it doesn’t matter and is just an opinion. I haven’t seen any data/studies either way showing that a benifit for SEO.
In theory there should be little difference between using the two. If the new website section is independent enough (i.e. there are a few valid arguments that it might actually belong on it’s own full domain), then it’s probably a pretty good candidate to use a subdomain for it, rather than a subdirectory.
A subdirectory could give you more of an opportunity to stick some keywords in without looking too spammy, but that’s a rather weak argument in favor of using one.
I do families of projects on one sub domains. For instance support. sales. blog. are all subdomains on a company I work with. If I setup an application like a CRM, I use a subdomain.
Typically I don’t push things into sub-directories beyond the normal /images /css /scripts. On the projects where I work where the structure is convoluted enough to require that, I use some kind of CMS.
I don’t know how strong a strategy it is, but as mentioned by ldcdc subdirectories are a place to stick keywords.
If I had some kind of specific content that I was trying to organize and optimize (an entire store of products, for instance), that seems like a good way of doing it but most of the people I see doing that are using their CMS to generate the “directories”.
For SEO it’s advisable to use Sub directory unless you have very large sections of the same website.
Subdomain name will be new web site for SE. So if SEO benefits is the main AIM - try to use sub directories.