Subdomain vs Subfolder for Your Community - It Just Doesn't Matter
If you do not have the time and can trust someone who's spent nearly 20 years building online communities and experimenting with SEO, here's the TL;DR version:
Both subdomain and subdirectory are equally good for SEO. Your community will attract organic traffic irrespective of its location.
Stop pulling your hair over this decision. I've built multiple communities and have hosted them on apex domains, subdomains, and even on subdirectories. It just doesn't matter anymore. We are no longer experiencing the Internet of 2011. Google has moved on, and you should too.
Still here? Good. Here's the long version, because someone on your team is going to ask you to defend this. 🙌
What Google says (and what it actually does)
Google settled this issue back 2012. Google's Matt Cutts answered this question directly back then, and Google has maintained their position. John Mueller has repeated the same thing many times since.
That's what Google tells you. Theory.
There were several SEO experiments done by agencies to find out what actually works in practical. Study by Semrush confirmed that both are okay while Cloudflare found that subdirectories were better.
The debate is never ending.
Why people still argue about it
The case against subdomains sounds reasonable. A subdirectory is clearly a part of your site, so the links and signals your community earns feed the same domain as your product and marketing pages.
A subdomain gets treated as a separate but related property. The flow is less direct.
Most of the case studies on the Internet follow the same template: they move from blog.company.com to company.com/blog . Traffic goes up and everyone says subdirectories are better than subdomains for SEO.
The truth is - that's not 'everything' they did. The studies don't show what changed and what was broken.
Subdomains Rank Fine
Easiest way to test this is to look a the big companies that rank their subdomains like a boss. For example, the big daddy of SEO, HubSpot runs their blog on HubSpot Blog | Marketing, Sales, Agency, and Customer Success Content and community on Community Hubspot . They've been ranking really well for nearly a decade.
I've done it myself.
At Gumlet, we hosted the community on the community.gumlet.com subdomain. The community grew organically attracting tens of thousands of visitors. We never had to worry about moving the community to subdirectory.
Do What's Easy and Forget
Running a community on your company's subdomain is easy and straightforward. Your IT department doesn't have to alter NGINX configuration to make it work. A simple CNAME or A-Record update in the DNS and you're live within minutes; HTTPS included.
No reverse proxy to build, no second property to monitor, easy configuration in Google Search Console, Straightforward Analytics, I can go on.
Should You Migrate?
No. Don't. If your community runs on subdirectory or subdomain and has its threads indexed in Google, don't touch it.
If you are starting a new community - simply go with subdomain.
Questions? Ask them below. Always happy to help.