Question

SEO Pros: If an organization has 2 different business entities under the same domain, does it "cancel out" the SEO and confuse Google? i. e. A school and a religious organisation share the same domain. Both the school and religious organisation use a different subdomain: e. g. brand. com/school and brand. com/religion Does it confuse Google or is it actually fine?  

Answer 1

Subdomain is a good solution for that

Comments

I appreciate it but I'm asking more about the diagnosis rather than a solution. Do you have any insights based on your SEO knowledge?  

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@harber there's no problem to have a different niche But you have to make sure that backlinks to your niche is relevant and from other sites that talks or have articles in your niche. For example : If you've a subdomain for Religion You'll need backlinks from relevant sites talking in religiuos topics

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@autogiro Thanks!  

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@harber urw!  

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@harber I hope the answer is helpful to u:)

Answer 2

Hey jason, first those are not subdomains. A subdomain would be: school. brand. com and that would be a better approach. But what you showed equates to a folder on the brand domain. The true subdomain would be the right way to go here and would not confuse google.  

Comments

Thanks for clarifying! I learned something today. Anyway if they are in different folders, does it affect Google?  

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@harber in folders google should still index them if they are all part of the same site with links and navigation joining the pages. So in that way it won’t affect indexing if set up right, but they really won’t be seen as separate sites, but content on the same site. Which is pretty awkward the way I’m interpreting the situation. For example the “home” page of the church or school really won’t be a true home page. In SERPs it will look sort of odd but might functionally “work”. But it’s the topical relevance of rankings that will probably get a bit weird. You are probably asking google to associate very different keyword concepts to a single domain. Church related and school related. It’s typically not too tough to change a folder into a subdomain and that’s why I mentioned it. It would be much cleaner to have truly independent websites for each.  

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Thanks Justin! I get what you mean now. Just for your information in case you want to know, the homepage is simply a landing page split into 2, one sending them to the first section and the other sending them into the second section if they like.  

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@harber oh yes, the classic brand mother page approach

Answer 3

Google should not be confused either way (more than usual), assuming both sections of the site have different content. Search engines still get a lot of things wrong, but the fact they don't distinguish between two pages well doesn't have anything to do with how they are published.  

Comments

Thanks Michael. They do have completely different content published on both folders/sections. So you're saying that it doesn't matter?  

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@harber I wouldn't go that far. It's complicated. If there isn't much published content around two similar concepts (such as "Michael's Montessori School curriculum" and "what is Michael's Montesori School" - not many people will be writing about them), then there is a good chance the algorithms will struggle to differentiate such pages for queries. But moving the content to different URLs won't necessarily help (it might contribute a small signal). You have to figure out how to differentiate the content according to the needs of an incredibly stupid system. Google has thousands of very smart people working for it but the search engine is still just a system of algorithms. There's no intelligence processing the queries. They are kind of like apples falling through different sized holes in a sorting machine.  

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@narcotize I read your response a number of times to be sure. So you're saying that the nature of the content on both sides matters more than the subdomain/folder setup?  

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@harber Yes, that's a fair assessment.  

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@narcotize Thanks!