Are Subdomains Good For SEO?
Subdomains have been around for quite some time now. Their utilization has also grown considerably. Despite their increasingly popular usage, most website owners do not know how to integrate them into the site structure or utilize them. As a website owner, before your developer integrates subdomains to your site, you should know what they are.
What is a sub-domain?
Simply put, a subdomain is a subset of your website used to organize your site structure favorably. A subdomain organizes or divides your site into specific and distinct sections for ease of navigation. As a business owner, it is more useful than not to integrate them. For them to be more effective, all our hosting solutions come with the provision for unlimited subdomains. This means that you can create as many subdomains as you want to partition your site and better organize your product pages. By hosting with Sasahost, you get access to this as well as comprehensive round-the-clock customer support.
Subdomains can sometimes be treated differently by Search Engines. It means that you can rank your product pages individually and set individual goals for each of them.
Why are subdomains necessary?
If you are running a large site and offering a wide variety of products and services, using a subdomain will be a better way to organize your site. Your prospects, clients, and customers will better navigate your site and access the areas of interest. For example, if they want to access the blog section of your site, they can key in blog.yourdomain.com or any other option depending on the specified navigation. Rather than accessing the root domain and looking from the specifics from your homepage, a subdomain will lead them to what they want as if it were a different site.
Besides that, you can also have subdomains as independent subsections of the website. If you are offering products A, B, C, D, and E, you can have inhouse teams working to enhance the goals and objectives of each product independently. In this case, product A will have an independent sub-website, a.yourdomain.com.
Moreover, subdomains can be necessitated by a large site that operates in different countries. You can create subdomains to make it easier for people in specific geographical locations to interact with you. They will all link to your root domain.
Having examined ways in which a subdomain may be necessary, here is how good it can be for SEO.
Domain Authority. Depending on the purpose of your site and how well you integrate the subdomains, your domain authority can trickle down to your subdomains. In this sense, if you have a domain authority score of 90, for example, your subdomains will also have a similar score in Search Engine Rankings; You will dominate your niche. However, a dismal domain authority score will reflect across all your subdomains.
Insert keyword in the URL. When coming up with a suitable domain for your eCommerce site, you may experience difficulties having your keywords reflected in your brand name as well as your URL. In such cases, subdomains will come in handy as you will have the opportunity to insert a keyword before your root domain to achieve SEO goals.
Improve user experience. Subdomains organize your site by subdividing it into sections. Ease of navigation is a very critical aspect of SEO. A decent structure will also mean your site sections are easily accessible. With well-integrated subdomains, prospects and clients can find your products from the homepage or through browsers without having to go through the trouble of going through the entire site.
Away from the positives, subdomains can also negatively impact your site SEO. If they are not well used, your root domain will suffer the consequences. Here is how.
Malware subdomains. If Google faults one of your subdomains for malpractice, the penalty will also reflect on your root domain. In this case, if a subdomain is blacklisted, for example, the root domain will not perform any better regardless of how much effort you put into your SEO practices.
Keywords. Pushing for similar keywords across your subdomains will affect your ranking. It may also lead to Google de-ranking your site.
Duplicate content. When uploading content under your subdomains, always be on the look-out for duplicate content. Duplicate content is dangerous in the practice of SEO. Never upload similar content under two or more subdomains.
In conclusion, aim to create them for good reasons. Think about your overall SEO goals and how they will help you achieve them. If you are not sure how to fully utilize them, find other ways of organizing your site.