Why Subdomains are a Bad Idea for Your SEO Ranking?

SEO Agency Christchurch

When you own a small business or are trying to increase your Google ranking, it’s tempting to go overboard with subdomains on your website. However, despite what the experts may tell you, subdomains are actually not effective for SEO ranking purposes, according to an SEO agency Christchurch. Here’s why subdomains can be bad for your Google rankings and how you can use them more effectively anyway.

What are subdomains?

subdomains or subdirectories are virtual hosts within your domain (under your main directory) that can each have their own distinctive pages, names and files. You should use them as much as possible to separate distinct web projects from one another and avoid any overlap between different web properties.

How does Google rank subdomain content?

The problem with subdomains is that it makes your website look like multiple smaller sites to Google. Google isn’t worried about bad links just because one page out of several on your site has spammy links; they could actually end up affecting your whole domain. 

So let’s say you have a subdomain and someone creates a link farm around that subdomain…links pointing at all pages of your site (on different ports) will be counted as one domain. 

And even if you don’t have any spammy links—even if you have a good quality links—Google may still penalize all pages on your main domain by association. This is especially important when trying to rank higher on Google search results.

SEO Agency Christchurch

Is there anything good about subdomains?

You may have heard about subdomains as one of those SEO secrets. But does it hold up under scrutiny? For years SEO Agency Christchurch wide have been touting subdomains as one of those SEO secrets that will rank your site on page 1 of Google. 

Is there anything good about subdomains? Are they even relevant anymore? The short answer is no. With Google’s focus on content quality, it’s clear that links matter more than ever before and linking to your site from another domain tells Google two things: you’re trusted by another website and you’re worthy of ranking well with them linking to you. Linking from a different domain can dilute that link juice, lowering your ranking with both sites.

Why you should avoid using too many subdomain sites?

Using too many subdomain sites (and having too many different hostnames) is not good for your SEO ranking. According to research Google’s team who analyze website quality and impact on search rankings. 

Having one website with multiple different addresses isn’t necessarily bad practice; as long as each one has its own individual content and can be accessed independently, there shouldn’t be any problems. 

But using multiple sites with practically identical content will make it more difficult for Google to understand what’s going on. In terms of SEO ranking and hosting needs, everything is better than subdomains.

Final checks!!!

While it may seem like subdomains may help you rank better on search engines because they allow you to rank as if they were separate sites, there’s really no advantage in using them. That’s where SEO Agency Christchurch comes in. The extra time and effort that goes into maintaining separate URLs is just not worth any advantages it brings when it comes to SEO. Additionally, Search Engines look at each page individually when analyzing rankings so by having all of your content on one page rather than spreading things out across several pages with different domain names will do nothing but strengthen your ranking with Search Engines.