Dumb SEO Questions

(Entry was posted by Chris Greene on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 05/07/2020).

Will Google consider subdomain as a separate site?

Hey guys, Question, a website owner who`s site/blog is on Wordpress now wants to add a store specifically Shopify, not Woocommerce. From my research and also contacting Shopify it seems you can only add it as a subdomain e.g. shop.domain.com (Shopify). Since this is the case, will Google consider the store separate from the main site as it`s on a subdomain?
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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

  • Perry Bernard: Yes. Sub domains are considered completely seperate and are distinct websites on their own
  • Michael Martinez: It depends on the navigation. If you incorporate the subdomain into your main site navigation as you would a subfolder it will often be treated as part of the same host.

    Differences in design may lead the search algorithms to differentiate the hosts.

    However, this should not have any negative impact on search performance for either host.
  • Ryan Jones: a subdomain is not a completely separate site. It all depends on the signals you give Google and how you use it. This won`t hurt if you link correctly ike Michael says above.

    I`ve seen plenty of examples even in search results where google is showing subdomains as the sitelinks of a site in results. SO they`re clearly treating it the same there.
  • Ammon Johns: As others indicate, the site-structure that you build via navigation and information architecture, the navigational hierarchy and ontology, can be a lot more important to Google than the actual file locations. In my experience, where the two may conflict, the navigational form always takes precedence.

    As an aside, this is a big part of the reason that `Domain Authority` is a worthless metric for anything but generalistic discussions - it is the links, not the actual domains and folders that count.

    I could build a 10 page website where none of the pages are actually on the same IP, never mind domain name, and so long as my navigation makes the site function like a site, Google will treat it as one. I mention this as an easy to replicate experiment anyone can do to verify for themselves.
  • Ammon Johns: As a further side-note, the one `exception` (sort of) in this is that Googlebot does have a built in idea of hierarchy, and it can shorten or truncate a given URL to look for a parent folder. But without links, this is a discovery thing, not a ranking thing.

View original question in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 05/07/2020).