Blog.domain.com vs domain.com/blog

Question

Besides style, is there a significant difference between 2, perhaps something like SEO?

And in style, is there a “standard” / good practice about this, or does it only depend on your personal preferences?

Answer 1

There is no "best practice."

The decision is most often dictated by administrative considerations, something else. Some considerations may include the following:

Subdomain

• you can place it on a completely different machine for the main site.
• this may make it difficult to integrate with the main site (cookies, authentication, database servers, etc.).
• The "blog" DNS entry is the first management point

Subdirectory

• blogging software makes perfect use of the same technology as the main site (e.g. php)
• blogging software necessarily uses the same technology on the main site (for example, linux).
• the web server is the first management point

As far as I know, this is slightly different from SEO. The difference he makes for SEO is the long-running moving goal . As of 2015, there is a wave of evidence and opinion regarding subdirectories.

Answer 2

Subdomains make it easier if you want to exchange the blog for another server (since you can change the DNS for the subdomain, but keep the main part of the domain pointing to the source machine), but they can also make AJAX requests and cookies behave differently - due to the fact that in some cases subdomains are considered as “different domains”.

Answer 3

blog.domain.com is interpreted as a website in its own place, where domain.com/blog is seen as a subpage or subdirectory of domain.com depending on how your blog is configured. I believe that Google Analytics even has the ability to check and track the subdomains that separate them as a separate site.

A site, such as DIYNetwork.com and About.com, uses subdomains because, although it still depends on the parent URL, it makes it easy to host a completely different and independent website in analytics tracking.