Subdomain

What is Subdomain? – Definition

A subdomain is a supplementary part of the domain name. It comes before the primary domain name, e.g. news.website.com.

Subdomain in Practice

Most often subdomains are used for:

• separating thematically related sections of the website, e.g. website.com;
• indicating a separate language version delante.co, de.delante.co;
• creating sales landing pages for a given campaign, e.g. delante.co – traffic from Google Ads is directed there;
• create test domains, such as website.com, dev.website.com;
• creating separate URLs for mobile users, e.g. website.com.

Subdomain and SEO

In SEO, it’s important to keep in mind that for Google, a subdomain is treated as an entirely separate domain and its visibility is completely different than of the main domain. Therefore, if you have a company blog on your website, it is recommended to place it in the subdirectory, e.g. delante.co/blog/, and not in the subdomain, e.g. blog.delante.co.

Interestingly, the ‘www’ prefix is also a subdomain. It is treated by Google as a separate website as well and as a result, if there are no 301 redirects introduced, it duplicates the website.

How are Domain Name and a Subdomain created?

• Subdomain – before the domain name, e.g., blog., test., www.
• Domain Name – comes before the domain name extension, e.g. a company name.
• TLD (Top-Level Domain) is a domain name extension that comes right after the domain name, e.g. .de, .com, .org, .edu, .eu.