Domains and subdomains are critical to your company's online presence. Implemented and later maintained well, they can improve your sites' reputation and email deliverability. However, some organizations choose to use the same domain as both a landing page and a bounceback domain. It's a risky move that can negatively influence your marketing efforts. Let's see how to properly manage your subdomains and get the most out of them.
Let's start with the basics, in this case, the differences between a domain and a subdomain.
These two terms are intertwined, yet there are some differences that we need to address.
A domain name is the named address of your company's website, also known as the element that comes after the @ in an email address. A domain is essentially a placeholder for an IP address. Before we used domains, people had to type in the entire IP address to reach a website.
As we know, the IP address consists of series of digits… But it would be almost impossible, to memorize such a long string of numbers, and that is why we use domain names. The domains are stored in a database of Domain Names System (DNS).
Subdomain, however, is the subset of the domain. You know addresses like mail.google.com, www.google.com, and docs.google.com, right? Well, they are all subdomains of the domain google.com. Domain owners can create subdomains to provide easy-to-remember addresses for web pages or services within their top-level domain.
Did you know?
In 2021, there were an estimated 367million “claimed” domain names (purchased and owned through aregistrar)
When setting up the DNS record for the root of each sub-domain, you can also utilize these sub-domains for landing pages. The most significant DNS issue for email deliverability lies in the CNAME record at the domain's top. CNAME is critical as it records and connects the parent domain to its alias or subdomains. While you can have a CNAME for any subdomain, placing it at the domain's top level is not permitted.
This illustration presents the key differences between domain and subdomain for websites and within emails:
___
The example for a website is quite simple — you have yourcompany’s domain, and then subdomains, that can refer to different aspects ofyour business. These are important for your SEO and visibility in searchengines.
Email subdomains are a bit different, though. They arealways associated with your root domain, but they have separate IP addresses.This means that ISPs and mailing servers see them as a separate element fromyour company's domain. Subdomains are also crucial to building your reputation -The better it is, the greater the chance that more people will read youremails.
What's more, if your subdomain is marked as spam and loses its reputation,other addresses will not be affected. This means that you can drop thesubdomains that are performing poorly without losing any value.
This illustration presents the key differences between domain and subdomain for websites and within emails:
___
The example for a website is quite simple — you have your company’s domain, and then subdomains, that can refer to different aspects of your business. These are important for your SEO and visibility in search engines.
Email subdomains are a bit different, though. They are always associated with your root domain, but they have separate IP addresses. This means that ISPs and mailing servers see them as a separate element from your company's domain. Subdomains are also crucial to building your reputation -The better it is, the greater the chance that more people will read your emails.
What's more, if your subdomain is marked as spam and loses its reputation, other addresses will not be affected. This means that you can drop the subdomains that are performing poorly without losing any value.