Tanmay Mohanty

Most organizations with multiple products or services do not set proper guidelines for the domain management. Here are few thoughts on the same.

Sub-folders or sub-directories are used to describe what individual pages are about while sub-domains and microsites are used to describe what an entire site is about.

When to use sub-folders

• Sub-folders or subdirectories are useful for organizing content in a meaningful way with search engine friendly URL.
• Sub-folders are good for websites having small content on different topics, but if they have large content on the same topic then sub-domains and microsites will be advisable.

For Example:
If website want to give info about mutual funds, insurance, real estate etc. sub-folders can do the task but if mutual funds, insurance and real estate are different products with all their related categories.

When to use sub-domains

• Sub-domains are useful for organizing content that is otherwise unrelated. Take Google for example, they have a news product at news.google.com, a maps product at maps.google.com and a email product at mail.google.com. Since they are fundamentally different from each other and Google’s main search product, they aren’t held under the same domain.
• If you already have a well established domain and want to expand out into other areas not completely related to your main website’s activities then a sub-domain may well be a good option. At the same time, people associate the sub-domain with your main domain’s brand, which means it can be easy to build up momentum on a vertical related to your main site.
• Sub-domains gives better options to show more pages on same topic in search result as Google will show a maximum of two URLs on a given search results pages from a given domain, but may show more from a given root domain if there are multiple sub-domains.

When to use Micro-sites

• If you have a new product or service that you potentially want to sell off or brand completely differently from your main business offering, a microsite makes a lot of sense.
• Microsites can overtake your original site to rank for more searches because it has more content on particular topic.
• Microsite can be good if you have an exact match domain name for a particular keyword you’re targeting, as Google’s preference for and ranking boost given to exact-match
• A new domain adds management and other costs.
• A new domain has to start from scratch to get it indexed by the search engines.
• The big problem with microsites is that they inherit none of the trust, authority, ranking power, consideration, etc.