Subdomain

What is a Subdomain? Website Organization

Subdomainis a domain name that is part of a larger domain name. It is often used to organize or categorize sections of a website. A subdomain is placed in front of the main domain, separated by a dot. Subdomains allow website owners to create separate sections of the website, each with its own content and purpose, but still part of the main domain.

Uses of Subdomains:

• Blogs: Create a separate blog section from the main site in the form of blog.example.com.
• E-commerce Stores: Set up a separate online store section, such as shop.example.com or store.example.com.
• Support/Help Centers: For customer support pages such as support.example.com or help.example.com.
• Mobile Versions: It used to be used for mobile-specific sites like m.example.com (now responsive design is often preferred).
• Different Geographic Regions or Languages: Regional or language-based content such as fr.example.com (for France) or de.example.com (for Germany).
• Development Environments: To test without affecting the live site such as dev.example.com or staging.example.com.

Subdomains and SEO:

The impact of subdomains on SEO is often discussed compared to subreddits (example.com/blog). In general:

• Search engines can perceive subdomains as an independent website, which means that each subdomain must gain its own domain authority.
• However, Google has stated that it treats subdomains and subdirectories similarly. What matters is how the content is organized and how useful it is for users.
• When supported by strong internal links from the parent domain, subdomains can also achieve good rankings.

Advantages of Creating Subdomains:

• Organization: Possibility of clearly separating different sections of the website.
• Performance: Performance optimization by hosting different partitions on separate servers (eg: using a separate CMS for the blog).
• Security: Manage the security or permissions of a particular subdomain independently of the main site.

Example:

Main website example.com if, a subdomain blog.example.com or shop.example.com could be. This allows the website owner to separate the blog or online store from the main website content, but still keep it under the same domain name. For example, a news site hosts its news at news.example.com, while the main site example.com may contain corporate information.