Subdomain or subfolder for link equity concentration? Google says equivalent; migration data says otherwise. Here is the settled 2026 view, with a decision framework, case studies and a migration checklist.
| TL;DR Google has said subdomains and subfolders are treated equally since 2012, and that is technically true. But link equity does not behave technically, it behaves practically. Backlinks earned by a subdomain pool their authority on that subdomain, and third-party tools such as Ahrefs literally score subdomains as separate entities. A subfolder pours every earned link onto one authority profile. That is the whole game. Settled 2026 verdict: put anything that should benefit from your domain’s authority in a subfolder. Reserve subdomains for genuinely separate entities (apps, staging, help portals, country sites you want isolated). If you are already on a subdomain, the old “our CMS forces it” excuse is dead, reverse proxies and headless setups now serve subfolders across any stack. Use the Link Equity Concentration Test below before you decide, and the migration checklist before you move. |
For thirteen years, Google has given the same answer to the same question. Subdomains and subfolders, according to Matt Cutts back in 2012, are “roughly equivalent”, and John Mueller has repeated the position for the better part of a decade: Google web search is fine with either, so pick a setup you can keep for the long term. If you take that at face value, this is a non-debate, choose whichever is convenient and move on.
And yet, with monotonous regularity, the same thing happens every time a company moves its blog from a subdomain onto the root domain: organic traffic climbs, sometimes by double digits, sometimes more. The gap between what Google says and what migration data shows is the most durable contradiction in technical SEO. Either Google is being evasive, or something other than the slash in the URL is doing the work.
This article settles it for 2026, specifically through the lens of link equity concentration rather than the tired generic comparison. Because that is where the real money is. A backlink is the single most expensive asset in link building, and where that link lands, on a subdomain or on your root domain, decides whether its authority compounds across your whole site or sits trapped in a silo. We will look at what Google actually means, what the controlled case studies actually show once you strip out the confounders, and exactly how to decide and migrate. If you want the broader picture on how authority flows through a site, our guide to what backlinks are and how link equity works is the foundation this piece builds on.
The 60-second answer
For SEO purposes, default to a subfolder (example.com/blog) for any content that should inherit and contribute to your main domain’s authority. Use a subdomain (blog.example.com) only when the content is a genuinely separate entity that you want measured, ranked and managed on its own. The reason is link equity: Google treats a subdomain as a semi-independent site, so the authority your backlinks earn does not automatically flow to the root domain, and vice versa. A subfolder shares every signal with the root by default.
That is the rule. Everything below is the evidence, the edge cases, and the execution. Here is the decision in one table before we justify it:
| If your content is… | Put it on a… | Why |
| Core, topically-related content (blog, guides, resources, product pages) | Subfolder | Concentrates link equity on one authority profile |
| A separate web application (app., dashboard., account.) | Subdomain | Functionally distinct; rarely needs root authority |
| A help centre or status page on third-party software | Subdomain | Operationally separate; little ranking value at stake |
| A regional site you want isolated for local signals | Subdomain or ccTLD | Deliberate separation can be the goal |
| A staging, dev or test environment | Subdomain (noindex) | Must never share signals with production |
What “link equity concentration” actually means
Link equity, sometimes called link juice, is the ranking power passed from one page or site to another through a link. It is the reason an editorial backlink from a respected publication moves your rankings while a footer link from a forgotten directory does not. The authority that backlinks transfer accumulates at two levels: the individual page (URL) and the site as a whole.
Concentration is the question of where that accumulated authority lands and whether it can be reused. Imagine you earn fifty strong editorial links over a year. If those links point at pages sitting on blog.example.com, the authority pools on that subdomain. Your product pages on www.example.com do not automatically draw on it. You have effectively run two link-building campaigns for two different sites that happen to share a brand. Now imagine the same fifty links pointing at example.com/blog/. Every one of them lifts the single authority profile that your money pages also live on. Same links, same cost, radically different return.
This is not a theoretical nicety, it is measurable in the tools you already pay for. Ahrefs treats subdomains as separate entities when it calculates Domain Rating, so a subdomain can carry a completely different DR from its root. For user-generated platforms such as WordPress.com or Blogspot, Ahrefs goes further and gives each user subdomain its own independent score precisely to stop people inheriting a platform’s authority for free. The metric vendors built their models around the same reality Google’s own systems operate on: a subdomain is its own thing until proven otherwise.
What Google says vs what the migration data shows
This is the section that has caused fifteen years of arguments, so let us be precise about both sides rather than picking a tribe.
What Google says
Google’s public position has three consistent parts. First, Googlebot can crawl and index both structures equally well, there is no technical handicap. Second, Google’s systems can, in many cases, recognise that a subdomain belongs to the same site as its root and treat them as one entity for ranking. Third, Mueller’s repeated advice is to pick the configuration that is easiest for your server and CMS and keep it, because changing URL architecture later causes temporary volatility. Taken together, the official line is: do not over-think this.
There is an important nuance people skip. Mueller has also said he would personally keep things together as much as possible, using subdomains only where the content is genuinely different. That is Google quietly endorsing consolidation, even while insisting there is no penalty for not consolidating. Both things are true at once, and that is the key to the whole puzzle.
What the migration data shows
The practitioner evidence runs the other way, and it is not thin. The best-known compilation is Rand Fishkin’s 2018 thread of fourteen migration case studies, which found that moving subdomain to subfolder almost always increased search traffic, and moving subfolder to subdomain almost always decreased it. Individual documented migrations tell the same story, which we will work through with numbers in the next section.
So who is right? Both. Google is right that there is no algorithmic subfolder bonus, no line of code that rewards a slash over a dot. The practitioners are right that, in the real world, consolidating content onto the root domain reliably improves performance. The resolution is that the gains come from what consolidation does to crawling, internal linking and signal aggregation, not from the URL pattern itself. Hold that thought, because it changes how you should execute.
The Link Equity Concentration Test (your decision framework)
Before you choose an architecture, or decide whether to migrate an existing one, run this five-question test. It is deliberately built around link equity rather than vague “brand” considerations, because link equity is the part that costs you money to build and is hardest to recover once fragmented. Score one point for each “yes”.
| # | Question | A “yes” means… |
| 1 | Does this content target keywords in the same topical universe as your money pages? | It should compound with the root → subfolder |
| 2 | Will this content actively earn backlinks over time (guides, data, tools, news)? | Those links are wasted on a subdomain → subfolder |
| 3 | Do you want this content’s authority to lift your commercial pages? | Only a subfolder shares equity by default → subfolder |
| 4 | Is this content run on the same brand, team and editorial standard? | No reason to silo it → subfolder |
| 5 | Would you be happy reporting this content’s performance inside your main site’s analytics, not separately? | It is part of one site → subfolder |
Scoring is blunt on purpose. Three or more “yes” answers means the content belongs in a subfolder, full stop. Zero to two means a subdomain is defensible, the content is separate enough that isolating its signals is acceptable or even desirable. The test forces you to confront the real trade-off: a subdomain is a decision to forgo link-equity sharing in exchange for separation. Sometimes that trade is worth it. Usually, for content you are investing in link building for, it is not.
The Consolidation Value Score (a worked example)
To make the cost concrete, estimate what you are leaving on the table. Take a B2B SaaS company whose blog sits on a subdomain and has earned, say, 120 referring domains over two years. Suppose the company’s link-building programme costs roughly the industry norm to acquire a quality editorial link, and that the blog accounts for the bulk of all earned links because that is what journalists and bloggers cite.
If those 120 referring domains are concentrated on a subdomain, none of that authority is reliably flowing to the /pricing, /features or /vs-competitor pages that actually convert. The Consolidation Value Score is simply: (share of total earned links sitting on the silo) multiplied by (the commercial value of the pages that could be drawing on them). When the blog earns 80% of your links and your commercial pages are the ones that need to rank, you are routing four-fifths of your most expensive asset away from the pages that pay the bills. You do not need a precise figure to see that this is the single highest-leverage architecture fix most sites have available.
The case-study evidence, with the confounders flagged
Migration case studies are persuasive but messy, because almost nobody migrates URLs in isolation. They redesign, replatform or change content at the same time. An honest reading flags those confounders rather than hiding them. Here are the cleanest documented examples, in both directions.
Pink Cake Box: +40% (subdomain → subfolder)
The most-cited single example is Pink Cake Box’s blog migration, documented by Jesse Heap, which moved from blog.pinkcakebox.com to pinkcakebox.com/blog and reported a 40% increase in organic sessions. The owner deliberately framed it as a near-isolated test of the URL change, which is why it has been repeated so widely. It is not perfectly clean, no migration is, but it is one of the closest things the industry has to a controlled experiment, and the direction is unambiguous.
Obility’s client: +75% blog traffic, +38% sitewide (subdomain → root)
A more recent, fuller example comes from Obility’s documented migration of a restaurant-software company’s blog from a subdomain to the main domain. Six months on, blog organic traffic was up 75%, sitewide traffic up 38%, the number of ranking keywords up 56%, and the site went from zero SERP features to several hundred. The sitewide lift is the tell, the whole domain improved, not just the migrated section, which is exactly what link-equity consolidation predicts and what a mere redesign would not.
Monster.co.uk: a large visibility jump (subdomain → subfolder)
At enterprise scale, Monster’s UK and German job sections were moved from jobs.monster.co.uk to monster.co.uk/jobs (and the German equivalent), with the UK site reported to have gained well over 100% in visibility afterwards. Treat the exact percentage with care, it is a secondary-sourced figure from a third-party analysis, but the pattern matches everything else.
iwantmyname: the cautionary counter-direction
The honest counter-example is iwantmyname moving its blog the other way, from a subfolder to a subdomain. Traffic fell and never recovered over six months. But this is the perfect illustration of confounders: they also changed CMS, and the new platform did not support HTTPS at a time when Google had begun rewarding it. So the drop cannot be attributed cleanly to the architecture alone. It still sits on the “subdomain hurt” side of the ledger, just with an asterisk.
Why subfolders concentrate link equity: the three mechanics
If there is no magic slash bonus, what actually produces the gains? Three concrete mechanisms, all of which a subfolder gets for free and a subdomain has to fight for.
1. Signal aggregation
Google evaluates sites partly at the host or site level. A subfolder is unambiguously part of the root host, so backlinks, topical relevance and trust signals aggregate into one profile that every page can draw on. A subdomain is a separate host that Google may or may not associate with the root. “May or may not” is the problem, you are betting your most expensive asset on an association Google has told you it does not guarantee. Subfolders remove the bet.
2. Internal linking and crawl flow
Links between a subdomain and its root function as internal links, but in practice they behave more like a hybrid, and they may not pass equity as efficiently as a within-folder link. Crawlers also treat subdomains as separate properties to discover and budget for, which can slow indexing of new content. Within a single host, internal links flow authority cleanly and crawlers reach new pages faster. This is also why the practitioners who argue subdomains are fine are not wrong, when a subdomain happens to have excellent internal linking back to the root, much of the gap closes. Architecture is the lever, but internal linking is the fulcrum. Our broader link building strategies guide covers how to build that internal structure deliberately rather than by accident.
3. One authority profile to compound
The compounding effect is the quiet giant. Authority is roughly logarithmic, the higher your profile climbs, the harder each additional point is to earn. Splitting your links across a subdomain and a root means neither profile ever reaches the altitude that one consolidated profile would. You are climbing two smaller hills instead of one mountain. For a brand whose commercial pages need to outrank well-funded competitors, that difference in altitude is frequently the difference between page one and page three.
A simple thought experiment makes the logarithm tangible. Suppose your earned links, if fully consolidated, would put your root domain at a strong authority level. Split half of those links onto a subdomain and you do not get two sites at three-quarters strength, you get two sites that are each meaningfully weaker than the single consolidated site would have been, because the back half of any authority climb is the expensive half. The subdomain rarely earns enough on its own to reach competitive altitude, and the root is now missing the links that would have carried it over the line. Both properties end up stuck in the mushy middle of the SERPs, which is the worst place to be: visible enough to cost you effort, not visible enough to earn traffic. Consolidation is the only move that lets the expensive top end of the curve actually pay off.
The honest counter-argument: it is the consolidation, not the slash
The most rigorous dissent comes from Ahrefs, whose own technical SEO lead Patrick Stox titled his analysis “Subdirectories Are Not Better Than Subdomains For SEO”. His argument is not that migrations do not produce gains, they clearly do, but that the gains come from the things that change alongside the URL: better internal linking, content improvements, signal consolidation, not from the folder structure as a ranking factor. He is right, and serious link builders should internalise this rather than dismiss it.
A neat illustration: in one expert round-up on the topic, a frequently-cited Salesforce migration that doubled traffic was examined via the Wayback Machine, and the analyst concluded the real driver was a markedly better internal linking structure on the subfolder version, not the move itself. That is the whole thesis in one example.
So why does this change nothing about the recommendation? Because a subfolder is the structure that makes all three winning mechanics the default. You can build excellent internal linking on a subdomain and consolidate signals manually, but you are doing extra work to recreate, imperfectly, what a subfolder gives you automatically. The settled position is not “subfolders have a secret bonus”. It is “subfolders make the things that actually help the path of least resistance, and subdomains make them the path of most resistance.” For anyone earning links at scale, you want the structure that compounds your work by default.
When a subdomain is still the right call in 2026
This is not a crusade against subdomains. They exist for good reasons, and forcing genuinely separate things into subfolders is its own mistake. A subdomain is the correct choice when:
- The content is a functionally separate application, app.example.com, dashboard.example.com, account.example.com. These rarely need to rank and rarely earn editorial links, so there is nothing to concentrate.
- You are running a support or help centre on third-party software, status.example.com, help.example.com. The operational convenience outweighs the modest ranking value at stake.
- You deliberately want signal separation, for example a regional or language site you want measured and managed independently. International architecture is its own discipline, and the choice between subdomains, subfolders and country-code domains has real authority-inheritance consequences, which our guide to international link building structures explores in depth.
- It is a staging, development or test environment, which should always be a subdomain and always be noindexed, so it can never bleed signals into production.
There is also a pragmatic point worth stating plainly: a busy, well-resourced blog on a subdomain will outperform a neglected one in a subfolder every single time. As one long-running HubSpot community thread on exactly this question put it, an active blog on a subdomain beats a stagnant blog in a subdirectory. Architecture is a multiplier on effort, not a substitute for it.
The 2026 technical reality: reverse proxies killed the CMS excuse
For years the single biggest reason real blogs sat on subdomains had nothing to do with SEO and everything to do with plumbing. If your main site ran on one stack and your blog ran on another, say a marketing site on a custom CMS and a blog on a hosted platform, serving the blog from a subfolder was genuinely hard. Hosted platforms such as HubSpot, for instance, cannot serve a blog as a subdirectory of an externally-hosted main site, they hand you a subdomain and that was that. Developers reasonably chose the subdomain because it was “cleaner”, and the link equity quietly leaked for years.
That excuse is gone. In 2026, reverse proxies and edge workers make subfolder serving straightforward even when your blog runs on a completely different platform from your main site. A Cloudflare Worker, an Nginx reverse proxy rule, or a comparable edge configuration intercepts requests to example.com/blog/ and silently fetches them from the other system, so visitors and Google see one unified domain while your teams keep their separate tools. This is the same edge-SEO toolkit that lets you patch technical issues without touching the origin server. If a developer tells you the blog has to be a subdomain because of the CMS, that was a 2019 answer.
One caution: reverse-proxy subfolder setups add an operational dependency, if the proxy misroutes, you can serve broken pages or, worse, default landing pages on URLs Google is actively crawling. It is the right architecture, but it needs monitoring. Pair the move with uptime checks on the proxied paths and a rollback plan.
The migration playbook (your Monday-morning deliverable)
Here is the part you can act on immediately. Two things you can do this week: a 30-minute audit to quantify trapped link equity, and a pre-flight checklist that prevents the migration disasters that give consolidation a bad name.
Step 1: The 30-minute trapped-equity audit
- In Ahrefs (or your tool of choice), enter your subdomain and your root domain separately, and record the referring domains and DR for each. The subdomain’s referring-domain count is your trapped equity, the links currently not consolidated onto the root.
- Export the subdomain’s backlink profile. Sort by the strength of the linking domain. The strongest editorial links are the ones whose authority you most want flowing to your commercial pages, and the ones most worth protecting through the migration.
- In Google Search Console, confirm the subdomain is verified as its own property (it will be), then pull its top pages by clicks and impressions. These are your priority redirect targets, map every one to its new subfolder URL before you touch anything.
- Run a crawl of the subdomain (Screaming Frog or similar) to capture the full URL inventory, including pages that earn no traffic but may still hold links. Nothing should migrate without a mapped destination.
That audit alone, even if you migrate nothing, tells you exactly how much of your link-building investment is sitting in a silo. For the tooling specifics, our guide to the best link building tools covers the crawlers and backlink indexes you will need.
Step 2: The pre-flight migration checklist
- One-to-one 301 redirects for every subdomain URL to its exact subfolder equivalent. Missing redirects turn into 404s and lost links, the single most common cause of failed migrations.
- Avoid redirect chains. Send each old URL straight to its final destination in one hop, redirect chains waste crawl budget and, by some estimates, bleed a little equity at each hop.
- Update internal links to point directly at the new subfolder URLs, not at the redirecting old ones. Redirects should be a safety net for external links, not your permanent internal wiring.
- Update and resubmit XML sitemaps in Search Console, and keep the old subdomain property verified so you can monitor how Google reprocesses it.
- Migrate URLs and CMS in separate phases where possible. Changing architecture and platform simultaneously is exactly what made the cautionary case studies impossible to interpret, and it makes your own results impossible to diagnose if something goes wrong.
- Reach out to your highest-value linking sites and ask them to update the link directly to the new URL. A live, non-redirected link is always cleaner than a 301, and your audit already told you which links are worth the effort.
Step 3: What to expect after launch
Plan for a dip. Most migrations show a temporary fall in impressions and clicks for the first two to four weeks while Google recrawls, reprocesses the redirects and consolidates signals onto the root. This is normal and not a sign of failure. The benchmark to watch is recovery: if rankings have not returned to baseline by around week eight, something in your redirect mapping is likely broken and needs auditing rather than patience.
Measuring link-equity recovery
Consolidation succeeds or fails on whether the authority actually moves. Track these signals, in roughly this order of trustworthiness:
- Root-domain referring domains in your backlink tool. After the migration settles, the links that were on the subdomain should progressively show against the root. Tool indexes lag reality, so allow several weeks, but the trend is the proof that consolidation worked.
- Rankings and impressions for the migrated pages and, crucially, for your commercial pages that did not move. A sitewide lift, like the Obility example showed, is the fingerprint of equity consolidation rather than a one-off content win.
- Ranking-keyword count for the whole domain. A rising count signals that the consolidated authority is helping pages compete for terms they could not reach before. Track it against your wider link building statistics and benchmarks so you are comparing against realistic movement, not noise.
- Crawl stats in Search Console. Faster discovery and indexing of new subfolder content, compared with the old subdomain, confirms the crawl-flow mechanic is now working in your favour.
The prospecting angle: should you build links to a subdomain?
This site is about earning links, so it is worth flipping the question. The subdomain-vs-subfolder decision is not only about your own architecture, it changes how you should evaluate other people’s sites as link targets, and how you point the links you earn.
First, your own campaigns. If you are running outreach, digital PR or guest posting, every placement you win should point at a URL on your root domain, not a subdomain, unless you have a deliberate reason to feed a separate property. It sounds obvious, but plenty of teams run a content campaign whose links all land on a blog subdomain, then wonder why their commercial rankings have not moved. The links worked, they just landed in the wrong silo. When you brief writers and editors on anchor destinations, treat the destination URL as a strategic decision, not an afterthought. Our guest posting guide covers how to specify destinations cleanly in outreach.
Second, evaluating targets. When you assess a prospective link source, check whether you are looking at the root domain’s authority or a subdomain’s. A guest-post opportunity on a strong publication is worth far more than one on a weak user-generated subdomain of a strong platform, even though both might superficially live under a high-authority brand. As we saw, user-generated subdomains carry their own independent authority scores, precisely because the platform’s authority does not transfer to them. A link from a free Blogspot or WordPress.com subdomain is not a link from Blogspot or WordPress, it is a link from a near-zero-authority page wearing a famous logo. Read the host, not the brand.
Third, reclamation. When you find an unlinked mention or a lost link, the URL it should point to is your root-domain destination. If old coverage links to a now-migrated subdomain, those links are passing through a redirect, which is fine but not optimal. Reclamation outreach, asking the publisher to update the link directly to the new subfolder URL, is one of the highest-return, lowest-effort link-building tasks available after any consolidation, because the relationship and the editorial decision already exist. You are simply tidying the plumbing so the equity flows cleanly.
Subdomains, subfolders and AI citations in 2026
There is a newer dimension the old subdomain debates never had to consider: generative engines. As AI search assistants increasingly cite sources, the question is whether they treat a subdomain as part of your brand or as a separate site, and whether your consolidated authority helps you get cited.
The honest answer in mid-2026 is that the mechanics are still settling, but the direction of travel reinforces the subfolder recommendation rather than complicating it. Generative engines lean heavily on entity understanding, they want to know which sites belong to which organisations and which carry topical authority. A consolidated root domain presents a single, clearer, stronger entity than the same content scattered across a root and several subdomains. The more fragmented your footprint, the more work you are asking an AI system to do to connect the pieces, and the easier it is for it to miss the connection entirely.
Practically, this means the consolidation case is now stronger than it was even two years ago, not weaker. The brand that concentrates its content, links and topical signals onto one authoritative domain is the brand that is easiest for both classical search and generative engines to understand, trust and cite. Fragmenting that footprint across subdomains was a minor handicap in a ten-blue-links world. In a world where a single cited source can capture the entire answer, it is a larger one. If you are weighing architecture decisions with one eye on AI visibility, the subfolder default is the safer long-term bet.
Five mistakes that sabotage a consolidation
- Migrating because a blog post said to, without auditing. If your subdomain has earned almost no links, the equity upside is small and the migration risk may not be worth it. Audit first, let the trapped-equity number make the decision.
- Forgetting a chunk of URLs. Old, low-traffic pages still hold links. A partial redirect map orphans those links and wastes the very equity you are trying to consolidate.
- Changing CMS and architecture in one move. You will never know which change caused which result, and if performance drops you cannot diagnose it. Sequence the changes.
- Leaving internal links pointing at redirected URLs. It works, but it is sloppy, slows crawling and slightly dilutes flow. Update the links at source.
- Migrating something that should have stayed separate. A standalone application or a deliberately-isolated regional site does not belong in a subfolder. The Link Equity Concentration Test exists to stop you over-correcting.
Frequently asked questions
Do subdomains hurt SEO in 2026?
Not as a penalty, no. Google does not demote subdomains. But subdomains can hurt your results indirectly, because the link equity your content earns pools on the subdomain rather than flowing to your root domain by default. For content you are actively building links for, that fragmentation is a real, measurable cost even though it is not a penalty.
Does Google treat subdomains and subfolders the same?
Technically yes, practically not always. Google can crawl and rank both equally and often associates a subdomain with its root, but it treats subdomains as semi-independent entities, so authority is not guaranteed to be shared. Subfolders share every signal with the root automatically. “Can be treated the same” is not the same as “will be treated the same”.
Does link equity pass between a subdomain and the root domain?
Some can pass through internal links between them, but it is not automatic and not as efficient as link flow within a single host. The safest assumption for planning is that a subdomain’s earned authority stays largely on the subdomain unless you have built strong internal linking back to the root. A subfolder removes the uncertainty entirely.
Should my blog be on a subdomain or a subfolder?
For almost every business, a subfolder (example.com/blog). A blog’s main SEO job is to earn links and topical authority that lift the whole site, especially the commercial pages. A subfolder pours that authority onto one profile. Put the blog on a subdomain only if it is a genuinely separate publication you want to rank and measure on its own.
Will moving from a subdomain to a subfolder increase traffic?
Usually, when the content is topically related and the migration is executed cleanly with one-to-one redirects and updated internal links. Documented migrations frequently show double-digit gains, including a sitewide lift, not just for the moved section. The gains come from consolidation of signals, crawling and internal linking, so a sloppy migration that breaks those things can just as easily lose traffic.
How long does a subdomain-to-subfolder migration take to recover?
Expect a temporary dip of two to four weeks as Google reprocesses the redirects, with recovery and gains typically visible by around week eight. If you are still below baseline after eight weeks, treat it as a redirect-mapping problem to audit rather than something to wait out.
The settled verdict
After fifteen years, the debate is settled, just not in the way either camp usually frames it. Google is telling the truth: there is no algorithmic reward for a subfolder. The practitioners are also telling the truth: consolidating onto the root domain reliably wins. Both hold because the wins come from what a subfolder makes automatic, signal aggregation, clean internal-link flow, and one compounding authority profile, rather than from the URL pattern.
So the rule for 2026 is simple and defensible. Default to a subfolder for anything that should benefit from, and contribute to, your domain’s authority, which is to say almost all of your content. Reserve subdomains for genuinely separate entities. Run the Link Equity Concentration Test before you decide, audit your trapped equity before you migrate, and execute the redirect map without shortcuts. Do that, and every backlink you earn from here on lands where it compounds. For the wider system that link equity feeds into, keep our link building strategies hub and backlinks fundamentals guide close at hand, architecture decides where authority lands, but strategy decides how much there is to land in the first place.
