Subdomain or subfolder?

[pinder325]

Hello,

We are working on a new site. The idea of the site is to have an ecommerce shop, but the homepage will be a content page, basically a blog page.
My developer wants to have the blog (home) page on a subdomain, so blog.example.com, because it will be easier to make a nice content page this way, and the the rest of the site will just be on the root domain (example.com). I'm just worried that this will be bad for our SEO efforts. I've always thought it was better to use a sub folder rather than a subdomain. If we get links to the content on the subdomain, will the link juice flow to the shop, on the root domain?

What are your thoughts?

[NickSamuel]

Hi OP,

Not sure what your developer is planning on using but you could easily have some sort of combination of a blog + shop using Wordpress and Woo-Commerce.

Why you would specifically want a blog on the homepage and then a shop within a folder is beyond me (surely the otherway round; e-commer site + a blog), but I know for a fact it would be very easy to do for the average Wordpress developer!

Kind regards and good luck!

Nick

[effectdigital]

The only real info I've seen direct from Google on a similar subject, is on this page:

• https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en

If you scroll down, there's a table on the page. It's a table of Google's supposed views on the pros and cons of different configurations (e.g: sub-folders vs sub domains) when considering an international roll-out. Obviously your situation is slightly different

All I'd say is, your home-page is supposed to be the top of the tree. The main page from which all other sub-things (including sub pages and sub domains) stem from

That being the case - why the heck would you have the homepage on a sub-domain sub-page? It's kind of like building an automobile with its wheels on the roof

I can't find any specific guidance on why you shouldn't do this. But my suspicion is, no one has felt the need to write much on it because it seems like sheer lunacy

If you have a developer / designer who can't work with a normal structure, I**'d probably replace them with someone more competent**. That to me sounds like very worrying whinging (and I'm usually someone who backs devs to the hilt!)

[Mat_C]

The question is why would you want to put the homepage of your webshop on a subdomain or subfolder?

I suppose your developer works with predefined frames for the pages of your webshop. If the homepage requires a different lay-out, the frame should be modified (custom coded). Same goes for your category or tag pages. These should have valuable content too and can't all be placed in different subdomains.

Regarding the use of subdomain or subfolder, this is a great article: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/subdomains-vs-subfolders-seo/239795/#close