Does Google Index Subdomains?
My Medium friends can read this over on Medium.
"Does Google index subdomains" lands in my Search Console every week. On a page that doesn't answer it at all. Great opportunity for a new story.
So, the short answer: yes. Google indexes subdomains like any other site. Why wouldn't it? But there are some things to keep in mind. With numbers from me.
My numbers
I run one domain, byburk.net. (Technically more, but those are not important for this article today).
So the big domain byburk.net. Everything I publish sits on subdomains of that domain that point at other companies' servers.
For example:
- stories.byburk.net is Medium.
- letters.byburk.net is Substack.
- shop.byburk.net is Gumroad
I wrote about that setup a while ago.
This morning I pulled the last 90 days from Search Console for both.
stories.byburk.net: 1.2 million impressions, about 11,800 clicks, 749 different pages that showed up in Google at least once.
Medium is pretty great for Google search and SEO.
letters.byburk.net: 475,000 impressions, about 1,800 clicks, 693 pages.
Substack lags behind significantly. That's not a Substack issue (alone), though. It's more how I use Substack.
Together, Medium and Substack get 1.7 million impressions. On two subdomains. Neither of them is "my website" in any technical sense that most people would think about. Medium hosts one, Substack the other. Google doesn't care.
And it isn't a size thing either. I have a few tiny tools on subdomains too. One-page things nobody links to. cardgen.byburk.net got 106 impressions. Tiny, but for a reason. I don't advertise this anywhere and it has almost no content.
quote.setstack.net got 62. Nothing to write home about, but indexed. Google found them on its own.
Separate sites
Now the small print. Google treats every subdomain as its own site. So you don't get SEO juice from the domain.
You can see that in how Search Console works. A URL-prefix property covers one address and its paths. A Domain property is the one that can include subdomains. Either you verify the whole domain, or you verify stories. and letters. one by one. I did the latter, and they show up as two separate properties with two separate sets of numbers.
Doesn't really matter how you do it. I like the separation.
Google's John Mueller said back in 2018 about subdomains: "In general, we see these the same." Meaning a subdomain and a folder. A folder would be byburk.net/letters/ for example. But that's not entirely true. It depends on what "the same" means.
For a subdomain, "seen the same" means: it gets crawled, indexed, and ranked on its own merits. What it does not get is a head start from the root domain. letters.byburk.net didn't inherit anything from byburk.net. It started close to zero and built up from there. Links that point at stories. help stories. Not letters.
A subdomain ranks like a new site, because to Google, it is one.
Whether a folder (yourname.com/blog) would have done better is an old debate. Logically, the folder would get juice from the domain because it sits in the domain.
On Medium and Substack you don't get that choice anyway. Subdomain or the platform's own address. That's it. No folder here. So I stick to subdomains in these cases.
Why they stay invisible
If your subdomain isn't showing up, it's usually not because it's a subdomain.
The reasons are the same as for any site. Nobody links to it yet. Backlinks are highly important. Much more than any of the "SEO advice" like good titles, meta descriptions or keywords strategies. Those are fine details that may help you get from 90% to 100%. But they won't help with the big chunk of SEO. Backlinks much more so.
Also, if your subdomain isn't showing up, there may be an issue with your sitemap. It's wrong or not even there. That means you never told Google it exists. In theory it should find you anyway… but yeah… in theory.
Then some platforms may even set a noindex somewhere. That means Google should NOT find your page. Bad.
Another one: The canonical tag still points at the platform's own address instead of yours, which can happen for a while after you connect a domain, from what I've seen. Or it's just new, and Google hasn't been by.
The fixes are somewhat similar. Verify the subdomain in Search Console, submit the sitemap, wait. Substack has one at /sitemap.xml. I wrote a whole piece about getting Substack into Google and the setup hasn't changed much since.
I also have an entire Substack SEO guide or a Medium guide, if you want platform details here.
Downsides, of course
Every subdomain is a fresh start. Ten subdomains means ten sites building trust separately, ten properties to check, ten sitemaps. My two are manageable. Ten would annoy me.
A new subdomain can rank worse than the platform address you had before. It probably will. Medium's own domain authority and ranking is huge. yourname.medium.com borrows from that. yourname.yourdomain.com borrows from nothing. That dip is temporary, at least it was for me, but it's there. (Still, it's the best decision to connect a custom domain.)
And the root domain stays empty in my case. Some SEO people would say that's a waste. Maybe. I am not done figuring this all out.
The Bottom Line
Yes, Google indexes subdomains. It has indexed 1,400+ of my pages across two of them, on servers I don't own, without me doing much more than connecting a domain and submitting a sitemap.
What that gives me is SEO juice to my own subdomains, that I can take with me and connect to other platforms at any time, and not lose SEO juice, domain authority, or content. None of this applies to the platform-owned subdomains like yourname.medium.com or yourname.substack.com.
That's why you should connect a custom domain or subdomain. In all cases. Every time.
Anyway, on the "Does Google Index Subdomains?" question: What people mean with the question is usually something else: will it rank?
And that depends on the same things as always. What's on the page, who links to it, and how long you keep at it. That's basically SEO in one sentence.
If you're not already, follow me on Medium.
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