Subdomains or subfolders? Which is best for SEO?

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up Podcast. We're pushing out some groovy insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy O, overseeing the Head of SEO Branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by the amazing, the incredible, the fabulous, the unequivocable, the always right, there's nothing I could say more about Crystal Carter, our own Head of SEO communications. I haven't done that kind of intro in a while, and it felt it was long overdue.

Crystal Carter:

I would tell you right now that I am not always right.

Mordy Oberstein:

Crystals is always right.

Crystal Carter:

I'm never always right. In fact, I was wrong. My husband got me a Fitbit for Christmas, and at first I was like, "Uh, how could you? What are you trying to say? What do you mean by this?" I was wrong about that. I love my Fitbit thing now. It's good. And I count my little steps and I do my little thing, and it's cool. So, I was wrong about that. And sometimes it's okay to admit when you got things incorrect, that's fine.

Mordy Oberstein:

Those are the small little things. But the big things, Crystal's always right.

Crystal Carter:

It's fine if you want to go with that, I'll take that to every meeting. So, next time you say it, I say to quote...

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay, you know what, let's do that. It will make meetings shorter, I think.

Crystal Carter:

It will.

Mordy Oberstein:

Which is the goal. This SERPs' Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix where you can not only subscribe to our monthly newsletter, Searchlight, over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can easily decide whether to structure your site with subfolders or subdomains, including from multilingual sites, as today, the battle wages on, subdomains or subfolders, which is better for SEO. Just ask John Mueller on Twitter, and tell him we sent you. I am just kidding, do not do that. He has literally asked 1,000 times over about this.

But yes, today we're stepping on that landmine that is a debate about subdomains versus subfolders. I feel it is the debate that's captured the hearts and souls of a generation of SEOs, which is better? Because just like Highlander, there can be only one. Or can there, I don't know. We're going right after the jugular with this one as we ask, is there really still a debate? When are subfolders or subdomains a good idea, when are they a bad idea? And just what exactly can Google grasp and what can't it grasp when it comes to how you structure your website?

Also, joining us, tech SEOs extraordinaire, Nikki Halliwell will join us to discuss the considerations of a migration for subdomain content to a subfolder, plus, we look at a little format on the SERP or a little SERP feature on the SERP, obviously, the SERP feature on the SERP, that's redundant, but anyway, that sheds a bit of light into this whole subdomain versus subfolder discussion, and survey what the feature tends to prefer.

And of course, with your snappiest SEO news and who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness on social media. So, Up Periscope as episode number 43 of the SERP's UP Podcast submerges you in an SEO question of all SEO questions. It's subdomain versus subfolder, and all of the subsequent conversation that follows on episode 43.

Crystal Carter:

I'm so glad that we're getting into this subject.

Mordy Oberstein:

Ooh, I didn't even think of that. That's so obvious, and I didn't even think of it.

Crystal Carter:

Well, I just had to submit that into the conversation.

Mordy Oberstein:

Ah, I was just going to... You beat me. You stole my thought. I was going to submit you were right again.

Crystal Carter:

All right. So, I'm excited to be talking about this. It comes up every now and then where people say, "What's better for SEO, a subdomain or a subfolder?" Before we get into it, in particular, let's just get everybody up to speed. So, a subdomain is essentially a part of your top-level domain. So, top-level domain might be example.com, for instance. A subdomain might be blog.example.com. It might also be something like de.example.com. For instance, if it was a language one, it might also be support.example.com.

These, essentially, are treated as separate entities from each other. So, it's not exactly treated as the same entity as your top-level domain, it's treated as a separate entity. And the way I like to think about the difference between a subdomain and a subfolder, which is when you have, essentially, the folder at the end of it, for instance, in the example.com example, you'd have example.com/blog, or as a subfolder or subdirectory, they are interchangeable terms, if you were going to have it as a subdomain, you would have it as blog.example.com.

Now, the difference between the two is, essentially, the same difference between a shed and an extension, because if you have a house and you want more space and you want to create more space for something that you've got going on, then you might think of building an extension onto your house, in which case the extension would be on the same property, but would use the same electricity, the same plumbing, and all of that sort of stuff.

However, if you were to build a shed, in this case a subdomain, then, essentially, you would need to run electricity to this different place. It might have a different circuit breaker. If you were going to put plumbing in, you might have to build a whole nother set of plumbing, et cetera, et cetera. It's all still on the same property, so it's all still understood as being part of the same ecosystem, however, they are two different entities. So, that's essentially the difference between a subdomain and a subfolder.

Where we get into conversations with SEOs about whether or not subfolders and subdomains are better or worse for an SEO is something that is a bit of a point of debate. Now, I asked the SEO high-of-mind whether or not subdomains or subfolders were better for SEO, and on Twitter I got 439 votes, and 83% of SEOs said that subfolders were better than subdomains. And I got some very interesting replies on that.

Now, the thing I find interesting about it was, it depends, really. I definitely think that subdomains have a place. And I think we'll get into a bit of some of the ways that people can use them, but subdomains can often be used for things like helpdesks, job boards, they can also be used for international SEO, they can be used for lots of other things like that. I've seen them used for corporate, like CSR things and things like that.

And essentially, to my mind, the time when you would use a subdomain is, essentially, where you have a bulk of content that maybe potentially needs a completely different set of infrastructure from your existing top-level domain and maybe would add better customer value if it was in that particular thing. A lot of times the subdomain things, for instance, Yukto uses a Wix subdomain for their customer support section, and it's got a specially dedicated framework for answering questions and doing customer service and raising tickets and things like that, which is different from their main website.

HubSpot, for instance, use their blog on a subdomain, which is very different from their main domain, which is dedicated entirely to their product. And their blog, @blog.hubspot.com, does very well in terms of SEO, but it has a completely different setup from their main domain. So, I definitely think that there is a place. However, lots of SEOs will report to you that they've seen some great results from moving blogs onto the main-level domain. And this is because it's really the top-level domain, and this is because it makes it easier to get more value out of links, it makes it more easy for users to find it.

You're also able to benefit from a lot of the search equity and a lot of the keyword understanding that Google has about the main domain in order to get great results on Search. So, I think it depends on what the user needs, but there are some great benefits to both.

Mordy Oberstein:

So, this whole debate falls under one of these weird SEO conversations because Google, for the longest time, has been like, "Whatever the heck you want." Yes, there are real differences, like setting it up in Search console on a subdomain is far, perhaps, depends, far more annoying because you have to add different properties for each subdomain and then you can't track them, and that's a problem. It might be better for you. It all depends. But it might be a little more annoying.

And that's a personal choice, fine. But Google's general thing is, "Yeah, it's kind of, you know, it's all good." They do, however, or have, however, said that sometimes Google does really separate the two out, and that's where I think the sweet spot is. I remember doing a webinar one time, it was actually with the SEJ, and someone had made a subfolder. I'm like, "Yeah. Well, Google said you can whatever you want."

And they send you the stuff after, I was building the T here a bit, but after some of the webinars, they sent you the comments that people leave. As one commented, "This guy knows nothing about SEO." So, people have really strong opinions about this.

Crystal Carter:

Really strong opinions.

Mordy Oberstein:

So, before I say what I'm about to say, I want everyone to take a drink, whether it be an alcoholic drink or just some water, clear your throat, let's relax for a minute. This is my opinion.

Crystal Carter:

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

This is not the SEO gospel.

Crystal Carter:

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

I think Google is not lying.

Crystal Carter:

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

Crazy, I know. I think it really does all depend. For example, I'll give you, again, a case. It's not an actual case. I'm not sure if they actually do this or not, but just imagine they did. CNN does use subdomains, for example. So, like travel.cnn, or entertainment.cnn, or, I don't know, news.cnn. I don't think that's an actual subdomain, news.cnn. That wouldn't make any sense.

I think Google understands that all of that is CNN reporting about different types of news; travel news, entertainment news, news-news in my case, which makes no sense. And I think they understand that should be looked at as one identity, one entity. To quote Eli Schwartz, he one time said in a talk I heard him give, Google has a self-driving car, he used to live in the Bay Area, and the car was able to determine whether or not a squirrel or a human being jumped out in front of it.

If they can do that, they can understand that travel.cnn and entertainment.cnn is all reporting about different types of news, as opposed to, and I don't know if they do this, and I should have looked at it beforehand, Honda. Honda has the cars, it has vehicles, all sorts of vehicles, motorcycles. They also have Honda robotics-

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

... which is totally separate. So, I don't know how they structure it, but imagine they had robots.honda versus cars.honda. I might look at those two things, like, "No, not connected." They're very different.

Crystal Carter:

So, in the discussion, Joelle Irvine from Moz, she was saying exactly what you're talking about. She says, "I use subdomains when the goals and audience are different. So, that's what you're talking about with your robotics and your cars. If the main goals of the site are brand awareness, engagement conversion for your business, then having jobs on a subdomain makes sense, for instance, and you can track and optimize them separately.

If audience and goals are the same, then subfolders are better for SEO, and that makes sense entirely. For instance, another one was Kindr Grindr, Grindr, the dating app, has a whole thing that talks about their CSR and how they do the corporate responsibility. They don't need to have that on their dating app thing that doesn't affect them things. It's useful-

Mordy Oberstein:

Exactly.

Crystal Carter:

... information for people to have. If somebody wants to see your sustainability report, that's great for your team or whatever, but it can sometimes confuse your overall brand entity in that, if you have it on your main domain, if it's not specifically relevant to the general intent of your general website. So, that's something that's interesting there.

Then, I think, also, here's something that was interesting. So, Alex Hartford was saying that, "I generally prefer subdomains only when it's poor content setup." A support product with a bad tech SEO or content-wise, for example, which I think is interesting because I think that's another point. Sometimes, with subdomain content, it's content that's not intended to rank anyway.

Mordy Oberstein:

Agreed.

Crystal Carter:

Sometimes it's content that is intended to serve a purpose, to provide value for your customers who know you and who know what you're doing, and things like that, but it's not necessarily intended to rank. So, a lot of people will have a lot of larger businesses. Enterprise businesses might have their corporate information online, they might have all their latest stock prices and things like that, and that's not necessarily going to rank.

They don't need it to be competitive, they need it to be visible so that they're transparent and all of that sort of information. They need to have a link to it. It doesn't really matter if it ranks or not. So, it's important to remember that it provides business value. I was actually involved in a project where we had a client who wanted to move a large chunk of their main content onto a subdomain, and I was initially very hesitant.

And I followed the SEO gospel, and they said, "No, this is a terrible idea. Do not do it. Oh, no, gosh, no, no, no." And what I found was that the client was like, "This subdomain product, the product that's going to be using the subdomain, has immense business value for us." It was one of those bells and whistles, fully integrated, so the back end was integrated with the front end.

And it was a situation where it was providing them a lot of business value, and so they decided that even if there was an SEO risk, they were willing to take it in order to benefit from the overall business value. So, bearing that in mind and trying to keep my clients happy, we tried to mitigate the risk as much as possible. One of the things that was important was making sure that the tech spec between the subdomain and the main domain, or the top-level domain, were as close to each other as possible.

So, when we initially got this subdomain product, the security level was much lower, and there was a lot of lag in the speed, and I was like, "This is terrible. If we're linking between the two, this is gonna be a terrible user experience, and it's not going to work." So, I campaigned and literally got the people, who built the product, to upgrade their security across the whole product so that they could fix it. And in the end, because we did the linking correctly and because we did lots of stuff, we actually saw a general benefit-

Mordy Oberstein:

Nice.

Crystal Carter:

... for the users, for the business, for everyone. So, I think that there's ways that you can do it. But one of the other things that someone mentioned was, they were having a discussion about subdomains and subfolders, and the client wanted to go forward with it. So, it's Ashley Thornhill. She was saying, "There are things we have to get done first and they want to jump into this new product," because I think that's another thing that people sometimes do with subdomain is they'll use it to patch up so that-

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

...everything here. And I think that that brings to mind one of the other issues is that, with a subdomain, you do need to maintain it. It is like the garden shed or your external garage, somebody needs to maintain it. And if somebody comes to you and they say, "We wanna split the site into a top-level domain and a subdomain," well, essentially, from an SEO point of view, that's two websites to manage because they're two different CMSs or two different setups or two different routing situations, all of that sort of stuff. So-

Mordy Oberstein:

That's a huge consideration, by the way. Just the practical considerations are the fact that you now have two distinct properties to deal with is a major thing to consider, and long-term, how the client is going to evolve as a business, and then what's going to happen in a year from now that you have these two distinct properties that they're going to need to handle and they're really going to want to have to deal with that in a year.

Crystal Carter:

Right, exactly. And this comes into international SEO as well. So, Lydia Infante, in her article about international SEO, she talks about that subdomains are sometimes the solution for international SEO. It's quite a common use for subdomains. We do it with Wix.com as well. And one of the things about that is that they have to evolve, be maintained. Each version of the site has to be maintained uniquely to make sure that it's working there as well, so it's something to think about that you've definitely got the chops to support your subdomain situation.

Mordy Oberstein:

I want to jump back to something you were saying before about links. I think it's a great thing we need to talk about. I've been involved in discussions with whether or not to go with a subfolder or a subdomain. The case was, it was a new product, the product was tangentially related to the core product that this company offered. And the question was, "What do you do with this thing?"

Because from a brand point of view, it definitely helps to have it on a subdomain, but the product was going to be kept separate for different audiences, and they weren't going to interlink between the two. So, you run the risk of Google not realizing, because it wasn't like, "Okay, here's our core product, here's like a very, very close variant of the core product subdomain. Okay, Google will be able to get that." Different, but the same. Same, but different.

You run the risk of Google not really understanding that the product on the subdomain is actually related to the core product on the main domain, and you're not going to have a lot of linking opportunities between the two because it's for different audiences, so now what? Then, you really run the risk of Google not realizing that this is all one story, because you're not linking.

Crystal Carter:

Right. The links are incredibly important. The links are incredibly important and should absolutely be factored into any decisions you make about how you're going to proceed with this subdomain or subfolder or whatever. So, when you see it work well, they're linking back and forth to each other and supporting each other where relevant.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's your power cable.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. Precisely, precisely. That's your shed.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's your power cable. Going back.

Crystal Carter:

These are the things. So, I think it's really important, and I think that-

Mordy Oberstein:

Do you use a special outdoor cable or any cable? What happens when it rains?

Crystal Carter:

Well, exactly. You've got to shore that all up. And these are very-

Mordy Oberstein:

One of those orange cables.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, with the little mat that you can walk over.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes, yes, yes, yes, exactly. That's how you want to handle your subdomain.

Crystal Carter:

So, links are really important. And I think, also, indented results... Are we going to-

Mordy Oberstein:

We're going to get... That's my spoiler.

Crystal Carter:

Okay, okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's my spoiler. Hey SEOs, I have some proof for you that Google does understand the relationship between domain and the various subdomains, because they do it right on the SERP. I'm not revealing that. You have to keep listening.

Crystal Carter:

Okay, okay. I have one more thing that I wanted to share from the discussion we had on Twitter, which was Freddie Chat. And there's lots of people who have great examples of this, who shared that he actually saw a really big bump moving from a subdomain to a subfolder, of an increase of 20% from moving one of his brands into a subfolder, in an international SEO perspective, which I think is interesting.

So, this is something that I find interesting considering that Google can sometimes find it a bit of a challenge with regards to international SEO. So, it's interesting to see that they've seen that increase, and that I think if they've done that well, then that's a really good example of somebody who managed that migration well, because essentially, if you're moving from a subfolder to a subdomain or moving from a subdomain to a subfolder, that's essentially a migration, and should be managed well.

So, if you are seeing a bump or you're a client who has seen the fruits of some SEO labor, then thank your SEO for helping you with that and making sure that that was managed well. So, yeah, there's some great things there. I will link to the discussion because there was a really great, fantastic thread, which I cannot give into all the details of it, but it's fantastic, from @darth_na as well where he gets into all of the details of the nuances of subfolders, subdomains, et cetera, and particularly, one of the-

Mordy Oberstein:

I've already tweeted to take him to do it.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, he loves a thread. One of the ones that was particularly prescient, I thought, was, he mentioned, if you have risky content, including Adal or low value or high similarity or uncertain quality, et cetera, he said these are best for putting them on a subdomain. I think that's really interesting of using it as a risk-management thing, particularly if you have a brand that has a particular unique positioning or has a very curated positioning, for instance.

So, you see this a lot with celebrities and things where they'll have their main website that's like, "Oh, yeah, look at me, I'm this person and I'm so great," and it's just lots of beauty shots, et cetera, et cetera, and then they'll have a subdomain that's their shop that's like, "And here's my merch."

Mordy Oberstein:

Exactly.

Crystal Carter:

…all my lifestyle things buy this T-shirt, that sort of thing. So, I think that that's interesting as well. Also, if the merch thing fails or doesn't work, then you can just-

Mordy Oberstein:

Get rid with it.

Crystal Carter:

... stop with the subdomain, and then it doesn't mess up the rest of your website.

Mordy Oberstein:

JLo, who's on Wix, does that, I believe.

Crystal Carter:

JLo does do that.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. By the way, just in case you're looking to get more on international SEO, we did a whole interview with Aleyda Solis about this. We'll link to that in the show notes as well. It's Crystal's thread of all the high-of-mind talking about subdomain and subfolders in the show notes. But now we're going to circle back to what you mentioned before, which is migrating or moving subdomain content over to a subfolder. And we're going to ask Nikki Halliwell what's her top consideration for migrating subdomain content to a subfolder. Take it away, Nikki.

Nikki Halliwell:

This is an interesting one for me because I've done several pieces of work around migrating from subdomains to subfolders, and also, investigations into the benefits of both of those. And overwhelmingly, in my experience, I definitely do prefer a subfolder. I'm going to start this off and share, first of all, that subdomains definitely do have their place. I'm not saying you should never use them whatsoever, but I do think that you need to have a special case for using them.

And that can be things like if there's a completely separate brand from the rest of the site, you're using an entirely different language, and there's not a particular reason why you can use a subfolder for that. I know that some CMSs limit the use of subfolders for international content. Also, if it's a help section, in cases like that, I think it's okay to use a subdomain, but certainly, for anything like a blog or newer areas of the website, in most cases I will always advocate for using a subfolder.

And one of the most interesting projects that I worked on around this was for a very large international medical equipment website, and they had done an international migration as part of a redesign of their website, and all of their international sub photos got moved onto subdomains, and there was a tank in performance. And we did lots of investigations into this to see what had happened and everything else.

And long story short, we were able to rule out everything else. And the only thing that remained was that the content was now on a subdomain. So, it was as if Google was seeing them as separate sites. Even though Google will tell you that they don't consider them as separate, it does tend to be the case, certainly in my experience. Then, I led the migration to move this content back onto the previous subfolders that it sat on.

So, instead of UK.domain, we now had domain/UK, and so on, for all of the different international variations that we had. And the results were instant. They went straight back up to 23,000 impressions, I think, was what we saw at the time, on average each day. And some were patterns with clicks and the average positions as well. In terms of top considerations when you are migrating to a subfolder, do your investigations, make sure that you know that it is the right decision.

Other things is just making sure that everyone is aware of what you're doing and why you are doing it. That includes everyone from internal stakeholders as well as the dev teams. Are they still able to sit on the same CMS as well? Sometimes, depending on what platform you have or how the website is built, if it's a custom CMS, they might need a bit more involvement from some of the dev teams.

And other things to think about during a migration such as this involves things like just making sure that you are very carefully planning all of your redirects. I'd suggest getting multiple people to check over your final redirects when you've done it just so that there is that extra layer of validation so you can mitigate the risk of any additional drops as much as possible.

Think about how you're redirecting. Obviously, you want to implement them in the right place, but also make sure that you're using 301 redirects and that they're all remaining on https. Again, that depends on how they're implemented. Then, one of the final points that I want to say to make sure that you consider when you are migrating from a subdomain to a subfolder is to take the time to update all of the internal links. These are now all going to be incorrect because obviously, before, they were pointing to the subdomain, so you now need to update them to point to the new version.

But that also means that you need to update things like your canonicals. You might be able to get a plugin to help you do this, but also things like HREFLANG, those will also need updating across the site as well. And that can be quite a large amount of work, but if you don't do it, you can see yourself falling into a lot of issues, and you might not see the uptick in performance that perhaps you expected if you don't take the time to update your internal links like that.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you so much, Nikki. I love the point, by the way, about have to go check the redirects, multiple people check the redirects.

Crystal Carter:

Oh, my gosh, yeah. No, it's really important. And updating internal links is also such an important thing to do. I think a lot of people forget that step because it can be very tedious, upload, updating all of your internal links, but it is absolutely crucial, because even if you've got redirects, what happens is that all of the redirects are happening on your server and it's dragging down your server as people are moving between all of those different spaces. So, if you can update your internal links to go to the direct link that they're supposed to be, that's really important.

But I think that the general takeaway from Nikki's fantastic advice is that all of these things should be done carefully and with care, and you should be making sure that anything you're implementing is technically sound. When she was talking about moving from the subfolder to the subdomain and seeing that they drop, I think one of the things that's interesting there is that, essentially, because they are treated as unique entities, the subdomain in the top-level domain, is, essentially you're starting from scratch.

So, in terms of your back link profile in terms of what Google knows about that entity, if time is of the essence, if you don't have time to build the brand equity for that specific subdomain, then it might be best to keep it in a subfolder set up because it allows you to build on some of the equity of the overall domain if you're on a subfolder, which is, I think, again, one of the reasons why people tend to try to do it if they can.

And I think that it's interesting that she was able to discern that that was the best thing to do in that situation because it takes a lot of data points to make that decision. Decisions like that shouldn't be made lightly because they require a lot of time and energy to implement.

Mordy Oberstein:

Now, speaking of subdomains and subfolders and which one is better, which one is worse and what would you do, and all what we just said and all what Nikki just said, I have the proof-

Crystal Carter:

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

... sort of, maybe. I want to get into that. Yeah, and I want to get into also just, what this feature, that is my proof, does and shows about things in general. Anyway. This time we're going to take a look at a little SERP feature. I don't know what to call it. A feature, maybe it's a layout, I don't know, a format, I don't know. We'll call it a feature, because in the SEO tools they label it separately. We're taking a look at indented results for a very special Top of the SERP to show you how Google can or can't relate to subdomains and subfolders. So, let's take it away with indented results from the Top of the SERP. So, I think you pointed this out to me.

Crystal Carter:

Yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

You pointed it out to me, but I think I made the connection. I don't know, maybe I'm taking too much credit for myself. You were right, you're right. Indented results Google will show. Let's say you search for the latest news, and you'll have, for example, "The economic times of India." They will show with their domain, and they'll show with maybe their sports news. They're not a sports site, they're an economic site. Their financial news and stock news, market news, and they'll all be different organic results, or they're all from the same site, but to show that they're on their own, that they're connected to the initial site's ranking or organic result, they get indented, like an outlier. They get a bit indented, and they're indented results.

Now, guess what? Sometimes there are subfolders that are part of the indented results, and this is what you pointed out, sometimes they're subdomains, which to me says, guess what, Google knows this domain and that and that subdomain and that subfolder and that other subdomain, it's all the same thing, because it shows it as all part of one organic result.

Crystal Carter:

This is what I've observed on a number of different occasions. This is something that I've experienced as a user. For instance, one of the classic ones is trying to figure out what the luggage allowance is on an airline, or something like that. If you look up "Ryanair suitcase allowance", for instance, then the top result will be from help.ryanair.com. Then, there'll be another result in the terms and conditions from ryanair.com. Then, there'll be another one from helpcenter.ryanair.com, and they're all talking about that baggage allowance.

But Google knows that they're all talking about the same thing for the same brand, and they're all serving the same intent. And essentially, one of the things that I think Google likes about a subdomain, particularly like a KB subdomain, is that it is a very clear intent.

Mordy Oberstein:

Correct.

Crystal Carter:

So, with the baggage and suitcase allowance query, for instance, they know that if I'm looking at suitcase allowance, I want to know what is the suitcase allowance. I don't want to have a discussion about the value of suitcases and what is a suitcase. No, thank you.

Mordy Oberstein:

Google loves documentation, loves documentation.

Crystal Carter:

They absolutely do. And what's really important for Abs, and particular for documentation and things like that, is that you're linking back and forth and in between some of the documentation information and also into maybe more conversational, maybe more informational information as well. But Google does this all the time. They are constantly pulling this through.

Mordy Oberstein:

I want to get into some of the trends around what Google's doing with the indented results. I don't want this to be just like, "I told you. See, Google does understand the connection." But one of the trends that I have seen, and same as you, is that Google loves to do this with knowledge-based content. And oftentimes that knowledge-based content that sits at a subdomain. For example, if you search for a Wix SEO, the first thing you get, the main non-indented result is our SEO gate where we go through all the features that we have for SEO, blah, blah, blah.

Then, the first indented result is actually the SEO learning hub. Then, there's a second result on a subdomain... I'm sorry, it's a subfolder rather, I apologize. Then, there's one about an article from the blog about SEO, and that's also an indented result. And the third indented result is support.wix.com subdomain. But it's very often knowledge-based content. Google loves throwing that in the indented results.

Crystal Carter:

So, to my mind, there's an SEO value for this in that it's taking up a lot of real estate.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah-

Crystal Carter:

I think that-

Mordy Oberstein:

... so big, huge, lot of real estate.

Crystal Carter:

Huge. I think it might be a bit of an overlooked SEO opportunity that a lot of people will ignore the subdomains. They'll ignore the support documentation, they'll ignore the help center, they'll ignore the jobs board, they'll ignore that sort of thing, for instance. But I'm sorry, if you're showing up for four search results across four domains under your brand-

Mordy Oberstein:

It's almost the entire above-the-fold. Spoiler alert, I'm spoiling some data that I got from nozzle.io, the average number of organic results that appear above the fold on the SERP is three and a half. And we're talking, there's four right here.

Crystal Carter:

Right. That's a lot, that's a lot. Also, sometimes you get subdomains that'll have the indented results, and then you'll have your top-level domain underneath that-

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes.

Crystal Carter:

... for some of those things. So, I think that if it's managed correctly, you can get a lot of good real estate, you can get a lot of good opportunities from those particular things. And again, it has to do with interlinking between the two, that has to do with having good clear connections between the two. For instance, you can declare, in your schema markup, that support documentation is run by this organization, @organization, et cetera, and you can link back to the main domain, you can have your footer that declares who you are, you can have your subdomains, et cetera, but there's lots of ways that you can do that. And the indented results... Semrush recently added in the feature where you can see what's an indented result and where they're spreading out, and they're updated their tools-

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

... so that you can see the SERP features reflected more clearly in the SERP write-up at the bottom. And I think it's really interesting because you can see the impact of it, and sometimes, with those indented results, which ones on top can affect what your click-through rate is. But I think that what's really important to think about this is, and you're a big advocate of this, but it's how your subdomains, how your domain domains, how the indented results all reflect your brand.

What I see when I see a brand that has a robust knowledge base, has a solid blog, has good product pages, et cetera, et cetera, is I see a brand that has a commitment to delivering good content and is looking to provide good value for their customers, and I think if you can reflect that at all stages, you're onto a winner or whatever you're doing.

Mordy Oberstein:

One other place I really see that is with news content. If you're in the new space, there's a huge amount of opportunity for indented results. Why I was using the "economic times of India", because that was the result I was literally looking at on the SERP. It shows up all the time from news content. And just to your point about the branding, it shows you that I as a website, as a brand, as a company, handle this topic really well in a really organized way also.

For example, one of the cases I was looking at, I think it was Yahoo, I think it was Yahoo. So, it was a query about financial news, and one of the indented results was something like finance.yahoo.com, and another one below it was money.yahoo.com, meaning, they've taken the topic of economics and finances, and they've parsed it out into multiple categories. And if you see that show up, I thought, initially, that's a bit repetitive, but when you dive into the content, it makes sense. It's taking it from a very different angle. They cover it from multiple perspectives for multiple users.

And by the way, it does really reflect, in my mind, that you've taken your content, thought about the different intents and the different users and created content in an organized way to deal with both of those audiences or all of those audiences or all of those intents at the same time, which is why it really works well in the news.

Just, by the way, back to our subdomain subfolder thing, the SERP for Europe and US News, you get US News and World Report. The first result is a subfolder for Europe news, so usnews.com/topics/locations, whatever it is, and then, one of the other results is travel.usnews.com. So, subdomain, subfolder, all in the same result. But if you're in the news space, and I find there are spaces, so know your space that don't have data, it's very anecdotal, but I find there are spaces that are more predisposed towards intended results than other spaces. So, make sure you know your space.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, yeah, it's really important, because I think the other thing is that you get into... Because you also have to think about this in terms of duplicate content. So, you have to think about this in terms of, if you've covered it on your KB, and your knowledge-based articles or your support documentation, or whatever you want to call it, is showing at the top of the indented results pack, for instance, and you're covering it on a blog, then you need to make sure that you're not duplicating that content as well.

So, I think you also need to think about, when you're doing your audits to make sure that you're looking at whatever keyword and whatever positioning you're going to be doing when you're creating your content, you also need to think about that content as well so that you're taking into account all of the things that are associated with your brand that are showing on the SERP. So, pay attention to your indented results. If you see the indented results, that's your brand showing with your brand, so you need to just double check that you're showing with the things that are appropriate, and also that what's on those pages that Google is showing in that collection. So, do check those things out.

Mordy Oberstein:

Speaking of checking things out, what you should always make sure to check out is the SEO news each and every week so that you are up-to-date on what's happening in the industry. This is why we cover the SEO news every week so you are up-to-date with what's happening in the industry. So, here's this week's Snappy News.

Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. First up, I have some perspective for you, Google Perspectives. As announced at Google I/O, the Perspectives filter is here. Well, if you're in the US. Per Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable, Google finally launches the Perspective Search Filter. Well, Barry, clearly impatient, it finally launches. I/O wasn't that long ago. But I'm glad that Barry got his wish, Perspectives is here.

The idea of Perspectives is, well, to give you wider perspective on the topic that's reflected in your search query. Currently, there's a lot of social media results in there. I think this is very early on. It's going to evolve. For example, if you search for the Beatles, the band, you get some YouTube videos about different songs and some content around who the lead singer is. It's not very perspectivy yet.

In this case, I think you would have things like perspectives if the Beatles or the Rolling Stones were the first real rock band, or which Beatle is the best. Clearly, it's George. But those kinds of things that really give you an extra layer of perspective on the topic. But again, it's very new.

Okay. Google held a live search central event in Tokyo, and friend of the show, Kenichi Suzuki was sharing some great tweets from his attendance of the event. For example, Kenichi tweeted that per Google's Gary Ish, Illyes Ish, whatever, "Machine learning-based ranking algorithms and signals are trained on content by humans for humans. They understand and promote natural content better," which, by the way, is an absolutely brilliant point that Gary's pointing out through Kenichi here, that if Google's using machine learning to train itself on what to show via the algorithm, then what is training itself on is going to be a very important part of that.

So, if Google's looking at saying, "Hey, great content is X," and in the data dataset it's focusing on content with, say, firsthand experience, then the output of that is going to be rewarding of firsthand experience. Anyway. We'll link to the tweets in the show notes, so check them out for sure. And last, but not least, Glen Gabe shared a fantastic case study showing that a site indeed thrived despite its abandoning of disavowing practices. Google has long said they ignore spammy links that are pointing to your sites, so you don't need to disavow them.

Many SEOs have been skeptical about Google's transparency here for some reason that is well beyond me. I take Google out their word about this. It makes absolutely total sense. Anyway. Well, Glenn took a look at a site that was very involved in disavowing links very energetically. They were hit by an update. Glen worked with the site to improve the site, but said, "Hey, you don't need to do that disavowing stuff." And they stopped doing the disavowing stuff because it's not worth anybody's time. And lo and behold, as the case study shows, the site did return towards its former glory all without the disavowing of links.

So, a great article. We'll link to it in the show notes, check it out. Glen, I hope us featuring your wonderful article is some consolation for the terrible way the Yankees have been playing. It's been depressing if you're a Yankees fan, like myself and Glen. Anyway, that's this week's Snappy News. How does it feel to be updated? It's always a good feeling to be updated.

Crystal Carter:

I feel refreshed.

Mordy Oberstein:

I feel updated.

Crystal Carter:

I feel sublime.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, that's what the SEO-ners do for you. That's the effect it has.

Crystal Carter:

Indeed.

Mordy Oberstein:

Barry has an effect on people. Speaking of people, as I just plow through segways like it's butter.

Crystal Carter:

That was silky smooth.

Mordy Oberstein:

Silky smooth. I took like a machete to warm butter, that's how smooth it was. Speaking of people, here's this week's follower of the week, and this week's follower of the week is none other than Jess Joyce over on Twitter @JessJoyce. We'll link to her profile in the show notes, but if you want to spell it out, which I will do painfully. It's @J-E-S-S-J-O-Y-C-E, Jess Joyce on Twitter. She's full of knowledge, a little fun, a little snarkiness sometimes I will always appreciate, and that's what makes her an absolutely great follow.

Crystal Carter:

Jess Joyce, yes, she's fantastically dedicated to technical SEO, and she just loves getting into the details of it. It's fantastic the way-

Mordy Oberstein:

And jokes.

Crystal Carter:

... she unpacks that. Yeah. And she's got a great sense of humor as well. So, she's a fantastic follower, and she shares some really good examples of her work and how she approaches what she does, and it's really incredible. So, yeah, she's a great person to follow, and yeah, cannot recommend enough.

Mordy Oberstein:

So, follow her.

Crystal Carter:

Already.

Mordy Oberstein:

Over on Twitter @JessJoyse, which brings us to the end of the episode.

Crystal Carter:

Oh.

Mordy Oberstein:

How about that?

Crystal Carter:

Have we... Oh, no, don't scratch. Delete.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay.

Crystal Carter:

I was going to make a sub joke, but I didn't.

Mordy Oberstein:

Is there a subliminal message in there that you wanted me to take away from that or...

Crystal Carter:

I think we have reached our conclusion-

Mordy Oberstein:

We wouldn't want to subjugate you to anymore.

Crystal Carter:

Oh, my gosh!

Mordy Oberstein:

Nailed it, nailed it, nailed it.

Crystal Carter:

It was superb. No, that's not one.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, no, no, no.

Crystal Carter:

That's not sub.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's-

Crystal Carter:

It certainly wasn't subpar.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's an upside down B, so I guess it counts.

Crystal Carter:

A cute B.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. Anyway, that's it for us this week's SEO. Thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week with a new episode we dive into, "How to grow from a junior to a senior at an SEO agency." Look for it wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO Learning About at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO.