Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Franchise sites: Should each franchise have a subdomain or subdirectory?
-
One of my clients has about 40 franchisees who are going to have their own sites on a WordPress multisite installation. The question they're wondering: should these be on subdirectories (thesite.com/this-franchise) or on subdomains (this-franchise.thesite.com)? Which is best for SEO?
Thanks!
-
As the parent company, I would want any individual work done to benefit the main site and as a store owner, I would want to have some benefit from the parent company as well. There need to be policies in place to prevent bad practices, but it should be all stores and the parent company helping each other. If they want to be treated as a separate entity then they should probably build a website themselves on a separate domain. Most major retailers have the stores in subfolders. Go check walmart.com as an example.
-
Thanks for the input. What if they want to be treated as separate sites? Do you think they should want to be treated like separate sites? The idea is these are franchises all over the country, so they have vastly different audiences/geolocations.
For us, we're really on the fence about which route we should take.
-
Best for SEO is with a subdirectory. Subdomains can be treated as separate websites.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Merging Niche Site
I posted a question about this a while ago, but still haven't pulled the trigger. I have a main site (bobsclothing.com). I also have a EM niche site (i.e shirtsmall.com). It would be more efficient for me to merge these site, because: I would have to manage content, promos, etc. on a single site. In other words, I can focus efforts on 1 site. If I am writing content, I don't have to split the work. I don't have to worry about duplicate content. Right now, if I enter a product URL into copyscape, the other sites is returned for many products. What makes me apprehensive are: The niche site actually ranks for more keywords than the main site, although it has lower revenue. Slightly lower PA, and DA. Niche site ranks top 20 for a profitable keyword that has about 1300 exact match searches. If you include the longer tail versions of the keyword it would be more. If I merge these sites, and do proper 301s (product to product, category to category) how likely is it that main site will still rank for that keyword? Am I likely to end up with a site that has stronger DA? Am I better off keeping the niche site and just focusing content efforts on the few keywords that it can rank well for? I appreciate any advice. If someone has done this, please share your experience. TIA
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
Blog subdomain not redirecting
Over the last few weeks I have been focused on fixing high and medium priority issues, as reported by the Moz crawler, after a recent transition to WordPress. I've made great progress, getting the high priority issues down from several hundred (various reasons, but many duplicates for things like non-www and www versions) to just five last week. And then there's this weeks report. For reasons I can't fathom, I am suddenly getting hundreds of duplicate content pages of the form http://blog.<domain>.com</domain> (being duplicates with the http://www.<domain>.com</domain> versions). I'm really unclear on why these suddenly appeared. I host my own WordPress site ie WordPress.org stuff. In Options / General everything refers to http://www.<domain>.com</domain> and has done for a number of weeks. I have no idea why the blog versions of the pages have suddenly appeared. FWIW, the non-www version of my pages still redirect to the www version, as I would expect. I'm obviously pretty concerned by this so any pointers greatly appreciated. Thanks. Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarkWill0 -
Moving to a new site while keeping old site live
For reasons I won't get into here, I need to move most of my site to a new domain (DOMAIN B) while keeping every single current detail on the old domain (DOMAIN A) as it is. Meaning, there will be 2 live websites that have mostly the same content, but I want the content to appear to search engines as though it now belongs to DOMAIN B. Weird situation. I know. I've run around in circles trying to figure out the best course of action. What do you think is the best way of going about this? Do I simply point DOMAIN A's canonical tags to the copied content on DOMAIN B and call it good? Should I ask sites that link to DOMAIN A to change their links to DOMAIN B, or start fresh and cut my losses? Should I still file a change of address with GWT, even though I'm not going to 301 redirect anything?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kdaniels0 -
Should I redirect images when I migrate my site
We are about to migrate a large website with a fair few images (20,000). At the moment we include images in the sitemap.xml so they are indexed by Google and drive traffic (not sure how I can find out how much though). Current image slugs are like:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ArchMedia
http://website.com/assets/images/a2/65680/thumbnails/638x425-crop.jpg?1402460458 Like on the old site, images on the new website will also have unreadable cache slugs, like:
http://website.com/site_media/media/cache/ce/7a/ce7aeffb1e5bdfc8d4288885c52de8e3.jpg All content pages on the new site will have the same slugs as on the old site. Should I go through the trouble of redirecting all these images?0 -
301 Redirect of subdomain?
Fellow Mozzers, I'm having a hard time wrapping my brain around a redirect issue and thought it was worth posing the question to the Moz community. I did a search first but couldn't find the exact answer I was looking for. How does a 301 redirect work when you redirect a sub domain example.homepage.com to www.homepage.com but you keep the sub directories of example.homepage.com/page-1 active and are trying to rank them? I'm dealing with a current project where this is happening and this doesn't make sense to me, to redirect the subdomain if you're also trying to rank/create search traffic for pages, sub directories on example.homepage.com. This also get's into the debate of if a sub domain site is viewed as it's own website and therefore has to rank itself. If this is true, it seems like we're kind of killing the authority of the site by redirecting it. Additionally, www.homepage.com has a much stronger link profile than example.homepage.com I hope this makes sense. Any thoughts are appreciated. Thanks for your time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SMG-Texas0 -
Create new subdomain or new site for new Niche Product?
We have an existing large site with strong, relevant traffic, including excellent SEO traffic. The company wants to launch a new business offering, specifically targeted at the "small business" segment. Because the "small business" customer is substantially different from the traditional "large corporation" customer, the company has decided to create a completely independent microsite for the "small business" market. Purely from a Marketing and Communications standpoint, this makes sense. From an SEO perspective, we have 2 options: Create the new "small business" microsite on a subdomain of the existing site, and benefit from the strong domain authority and trust of the existing site. Build the microsite on a separate domain with exact primary keyword match in the domain name. My sense is that option #1 is by far the better option in the short and long run. Am I correct? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | axelk0 -
Should we stream videos from a subdomain or subfolder?
This is causing some hand-wrangling and I need some help. Let's say we were developing rich video content for our products and our agency is hosting the content on a new external server. There are already plans to link to these videos from product detail pages, category pages, and landing pages on our main website: www.example.com. Would it be better to create a new subdomain or to use a subfolder with a reverse proxy technique for this video content? It's not truly a microsite and will not have a gallery page to navigate the various videos. For example, would it be better to use this: video.example.com/ ...or this (executed with a reverse proxy😞 www.example.com/video/ Of course, regardless of whether this new content will live on a subdomain or within a subfolder, we plan on creating a video Sitemap using guidance from Justin Hammack in this terrific post.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ryan-Ricketts1 -
Move blog from subdomain to main domain on ecom site?
I am wondering what my fellow mozers think. Pretty set about my direction but want to get any other input to aid in my decision. Have an ecom site with a www.blog.maindomain.com. The blog is fairly new and no major rankings. There are only about 30 posts. This isn't a super competitive market and the blogging won't be a huge part of our content strategy but I would like to use it for passing juice etc. Would you go through the trouble to move the blog to www.site.com/blog and redirecting all the old content to new?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PEnterprises0