Almost as “timeless” as the Mac vs. PC question is that of subdomains vs. subfolders. What are the pros and cons of each and why will some people benefit more from one over the other? It all depends on the current search engine trends. Right off the bat, the obvious difference is in the appearance of your urls. To those unfamiliar with the terms, a subdomain will appear as sub.domain.com, and a subfolder will look like domain.com/subfolder. Some people make their choice strictly based on appearance, but, others take into consideration many factors.


Subdomains are treated as an entirely new “domain” in Google, for starters. This means that you will be starting with zero PR and will have to build up links to your pages as if the website was brand new. The good thing is that Google still counts the age of the main domain when ranking the subdomain so you will most likely be indexed as an older domain. The indexing process might take longer than with a subfolder, however, mostly because Google sends a few bots at a time to new sites as opposed to “authority” sites where bots are constantly gathering new information. When it comes to Alexa rankings however, it appears that subdomains and domains are treated as the same site, which makes sense because Alexa figures that you will have similar content on both. Most people use subdomains for sites that all have something in common with the main site. For example, finance.yahoo.com, jobs.yahoo.com, maps.yahoo.com. Subdomains are a great way to tie multiple areas of your site together while keeping them separated as well.

Subfolders are more commonly used simply because they are much easier to set up. To set up a subfolder you literally create a folder where you want the content to appear. This is true with any hosting platform and most people find it very convenient. If you use subfolders then Google will automatically treat your new content as part of your original site. This means they will send bots immediately to index your new content as soon as they find it. Subfolders are not as easy to remember since sometimes they can go many levels deep. Somehow people prefer to type in finance.yahoo.com than yahoo.com/finance/. Of course with some sites it could be domain.com/folder1/folder2/folder3/page.html. It all depends on how well the site is laid out. For the most part subfolders are used when creating content that is directly applicable to the main site or when a lot of categories will be created. For example, if you were going to set up a website to review stocks you could use something like Yahoo uses with their finance.yahoo.com. But if you were going to review individual stocks and categorize them you would be better off using subfolders like so: domain.com/YHOO/.

Of course everybody will have slightly different opinions on which setup is better, but, when it comes down to it, it’s your decision. Pick what works for you and run with it.