: Many user-created sites/pages and subdomains. SEO questions for primary domain My site allows people to create free websites and provides them with a subdomain link to their site. For example,

@Candy875

I completely understand what you are trying to do as I have run into similar situations with my real estate clients and their agents. For example:


bob-smith.realestateco.com/how-to-buy-a-home
mary-jane.realestateco.com/how-to-buy-a-home realestateco.com/how-to-buy-a-home

Here the company wants to rank for this page but each agent wants to have their own branded page with their own image and styling so their clients can see they're the real deal.

Honestly I'd recommend going with the subdirectory route which will strengthen a single domain vs breaking out your value within subdomains. This way also makes your life easier when looking at analytics and GWT data you can break out traffic by subdirectories.

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@Kristi941

To be perfectly honest, I believe using a canonical url for example.com/user/page/articlefrom user.example.com/page/article would be a poor use of your business case.

You are essentially stating that, all things being equal, you'd prefer organic traffic to go to /user/page/article instead of a sub-domain.

Whilst this might help grow authority of your root domain, it will have diminishing returns over time and the slight edge in authority would probably not be worth the dilution of relevance each individual subdomain would have.

It is a lot harder to have subfolders as entities recognised by Google than it would be for subdomains.

For a live example, typing related:doodlemum.wordpress.com produces real world examples of related websites, whereas an alternative url structure featuring sub-folders would be very difficult to produce the same results.

I would advise against this unless you perform some very small tests of a subset of subdomains/folders to conclusively prove that you are getting greater volume and quality of traffic from the /user/page/article format vs the user.example.com/page/article format.

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