On how many occasions when creating a blog or a landing have you wondered if it is better to create a subdomain or folder? Both options have strengths and weaknesses, therefore there is no correct answer to the question, although, on some occasions, there are technical limitations that lead us by default towards the first option.

In this article we will talk about how to deal with a coexistence that we have met on several occasions with different clients, that of Hubspot and Wordpress.

Anatomy of a URL

First of all, we will quickly explain how these internet addresses are structured that we are very used to seeing and using, but that we do not necessarily know what they mean.

If we dissect this url we will see that it is made up of 6 parts and each of them is important.

1- Protocol:

We all know http (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) or https (HTTP Strict Transport Security). They are the two most common protocols. In this case we have little decision-making capacity, only if we want the second case (highly recommended and practically essential today) or the first, less secure and with which we can find problems with different browsers.

2- Subdomain:

This is the object of the article and we will talk about it below, basically it is a third level domain that depends on the main domain. You can create as many as you need at no cost.

3 - Domain:

It is the main domain, so to speak, that we buy. It is usually the name of the company whenever possible

4 - Top Level Domain (TLD):

It comes with the main domain and there are many types, for example from countries (.es, .uk. .Fr, etc ...) or other types .net, .com, .edu, .org, etc. .. the objective is to position your domain in a country or a type of service, thus helping to communicate more directly.

5 - Folder:

We must understand the main domain as a large repository that contains all the files on the web page, it can also have subfolders that contain other pages and files. In a url these capitas are reflected in this fifth point, they are useful to order the content.

6 - Page:

It is the final content, equivalent to the file name. In the case of CMS, this sector of the domain can generally be freely modified, since it has great importance in SEO.

A url can contain other elements such as variables, anchors, etc ... but in this case we have mentioned the most common parts and on which you can work on positioning.

Subdomain or Folder: The decision

Once the decision is made to buy a domain with a certain tld, the next step is to choose the subdomain. By default when we talk about the corporate website, always choose 3 w, it is the most popular format, later the contents hang from folders, creating an authority in which the www subdomain controls everything. But as we said at the beginning there are situations that force us to create other subdomains, this is the situation we find when they have to live together a website made in Wordpress and a blog made in Hubspot. What can we do?

In this case, the decision is simple, we have to create different subdomains, and each one will direct us to a server. In other words, it is technically not possible, for example, for www.digitalmakers.cat to go to one server and www.digitalmakers.cat/blog to go to another, each subdomain can only have one address. Therefore, creating a blog.digitalmakers.cat allows us to overcome this technical limitation and to be able to manage each tool on each server without the need to buy new domains.

Hubspot knows this casuistry and within its tool it already has a section to agilely configure the necessary subdomains.

And does this technical limitation harm SEO?

Usually we tell you about the importance of SEO, and increasingly, companies are aware. Therefore, a question they ask us immediately when we explain this situation to them is whether the positioning will harm them.

Google treats subdomains and folders differently. In this case, the latter drag the ranking that Google grants to the domain, while the former treats them as independent websites. Therefore it is logical to think that creating a subdomain will harm you in positioning, but it is not entirely real, since as we always say, in SEO there are no blacks and whites.

When you are creating a product or service with its own identity, as you could do on a landing or when creating a blog, having Google treat it as an independent entity from the web is a good option, since you can focus on positioning this subdomain individually, without the other subdomains you have conditioning you. For example, imagine that you are creating a blog, you make efforts to position it, but being created in a folder of the main domain on which you have not worked on positioning, all efforts will be a partition. Another case, you are creating a landing of a product that has a secondary weight on the main web, in this case being a folder the fact that it has little presence on the web will reduce visibility in search engines, while a subdomain will be easier to position.

Summarizing:

In this article, we wanted to explain to you in a simple way how domains work and we have focused on a case such as the coexistence of Husbpot and Wordpress. But there are other situations that may require decisions of this type, if you have questions about the range of options offered by a domain and what decisions to make, you can contact us and we will help you.