Subfolder vs. Subdomain V2

Marketing & Content Hub Blog, Website & Page Publishing
1

There have been many discussions on this theme before, like this one.

I’ve asked several SEO experts about having the blog separately on a subdomain and the SEO effects of that.

We often tend to recommend our clients who host their websites outside of HubSpot to have their blog on a subdomain, primarily because it’s easier to manage, track and work with. It’s also a place where we can focus all of our efforts on SEO because we don’t have access to make changes on their website.

This is what I’ve heard from one of the experts:

Subdomains are treated as independent websites and don’t inherit the equity of the main domain.

When you blend different architectures, you will get contextual tag collisions. From the SEO point of view, I always recommend keeping the blog in a subfolder to spread the page equity and allow the whole site to benefit from the extra content.

The alternative is to keep on posting blog articles from their existing CMS through them. Should we follow the SEO best practice of having the blog in subfolders?

What does HubSpot say about this?

2

Hey @TomasKristiansn

There are endless articles about it ( SEM Rush, HubSpot Blog, Ahrefs) and the common theme seems to “it depends”…

Strictly speaking a sub-domain will be treated differently than the main domain. My pragmatic view is, that unless you have massive domain authority and shed loads of traffic on the existing main domain, it becomes all a bit of a theoretical discussion. This quote is back from 2012, so things have might changed since then, but it resonates with me:

They’re roughly equivalent. I would basically go with whichever one is easier for you in terms of configuration, your CMSs, all that sort of stuff… Both are on the same domain overall and so it’s really a question of which one is easier for you. Whichever one makes you happier I’d go ahead and do it that way.

Matt Cutts, Former Head of Webspam Google