So, should you have your blog on a subdomain or a subfolder? If there were no technical limitations, the answer would’ve always been a subfolder. But given the reality of different platforms, departments, and requirements, it has been “whatever works best for you because it makes no difference.”
But in reality, at least when it comes to SEO, the data, experts, and now, the Google leak all point in one direction: for better search traffic, a subfolder is a must.
I will refer to other people for most of this blog post because this has been a hot topic in SEO circles for literally decades. It has received renewed interest due to the May 2024 leak.
Google leak exposes contradictions in Google’s public statements and its algorithm
The leak was by far the biggest news in SEO ever because it (partially) revealed how the algo worked. For the first time, SEOs could find validation after their own testing contradicted Google’s official statements. This was especially exonerating for people constantly bashed by Google’s fanboys, who always took the official word as gospel.
One of the people exonerated is Rand Fishkin, the ex-founder of the well-known SEO service Moz who also broke the news.
Here’s the relevant bit:
Many of their claims directly contradict public statements made by Googlers over the years, in particular the company’s repeated denial that click-centric user signals are employed, denial that subdomains are considered separately in rankings, denials of a sandbox for newer websites, denials that a domain’s age is collected or considered, and more.
Source: SparkToro
The first analysis of the leak was by Mike King, and this is one of the relevant sections:
There is also evidence that they contemplate its scoring on the subdomain, root domain, and URL level which inherently indicates they treat different levels of a site differently.
Source: iPullRank
If you’re interested in the leak, I highly recommend reading the above two posts.
Evidence for subfolder over subdomain for SEO has been there for years
Rand Fishkin posted a tweet back in 2018 with 14 different case studies that showed improvements in traffic when changing the blog from subdomain to subfolder.
The best one is:
40% increase in traffic and 15% increase in leads
Source: LinkedIn Pulse
Remember, the only change was moving the blog from subdomain to subfolder.
Therefore, the conclusion is clear:
“Content that’s placed in a subfolder will almost always perform better in Google (and Bing and DuckDuckGo) than the same content placed in a subdomain,” said Rand Fishkin, Founder, SparkToro (and former Wizard of Moz).
Source: MarketingSherpa Blog
You can read more great case studies on the Sistrix blog post subdomains vs subdirectories.
Not convinced? Two more reasons, as per MarketingSherpa:
- Better accuracy of analytics and tracking due to no cross-domain tracking
- Usability for users because of cleaner URLs that are easier to read
How to move your WordPress blog from subdomain to subfolder, regardless of the main website platform
Nowadays, there are many options for loading different platforms on the same root domain. We built PressProxy as the easiest way for WordPress on any platform.
PressProxy works with Cloudflare, and the whole setup takes only a few minutes. To learn more, visit our homepage.
