What is the Difference between Sub Domains and Sub Directories?

Sub domains

When you use sub domains, it is written like subdomain.domain.com. The subdomain part is put before your main domain. This informs Google and your audience that the contents present in the sub domain is different from the content present on the rest of your website. Sub domains is mainly used for a business site where the blog is separate and also different from the forum aspect of a subdomain as well. To know more aspects about sub domains for SEO, get in touch with corporate SEO services or hire one to look after the entire concept for your business site itself.

Benefits

When you have multiple pages for a single keyword, sub domains come in handy. Google restricts the number of search results per domain, but this is not the case with sub domains. Another benefit is that if you can assign your keywords as sub domain names. This is great because if your domain doesn’t have a name, then, you may need to create a separate sub domain. This can be done with the help of sub directories but it would be easier with sub domains.

Drawbacks

Sub domains are tough to set and manage and they never inherit metrics from the main domain. Sometimes, this is the only reason where you would hate to work with sub domains, meaning that you will have to optimize everything from scratch.

Sub directories

Sub directories are written like domain.com/subdirectory. The distinction is not only about syntax. This is more to what meets the eye and is associated with the type of content you have. This is also not a point to decide where to use sub domains or directories but if content needs a separate site then go for sub domains. If the content doesn’t have much difference from the main content, then sub directories will do the trick. 

When to use either of them?

Sub domains can always be used for larger topics, for instance, if you have a health website then you need to create different domains for each major disease and then build a sub folder for separate diseases in the group. If your site has a blog and/or forum, apart from the corporate pages, then always use sub domains for forums and the blogs like: forum.domain.com and blog.domain.com. These rules are not set in stone and it is purely based on trial and error. So, check what works for your website and ignore the aspects which don’t.