GoDaddy Says to Add Social Subdomains for SEO—Should You Actually Do It?

Should You Set Up Social Subdomains Like GoDaddy Suggests?

Only if you want a cleaner way to share social links on business cards or in verbal conversations. The SEO benefits GoDaddy advertises don’t exist. When you create facebook.yourdomain.com and redirect it to your Facebook page, you’re telling search engines “ignore this—go look at Facebook instead.” Any authority that URL generates flows to Facebook, not to your website.

The technical claims about safety and promotion are accurate. The SEO claim is marketing fiction designed to add perceived value to domain purchases.

Breaking Down GoDaddy’s Three Claims

Claim 1: “Improved SEO” — False

GoDaddy states: “Social subdomains can help your website rank higher in search engines.”

This is not how SEO works. Here’s what actually happens:

Link authority flows away from you. When you set up a 301 redirect from facebook.yourdomain.com to facebook.com/yourpage, you’re creating a one-way street. Any link equity that subdomain might accumulate gets passed to Facebook. Google sees this as: “The owner of this subdomain says the real content is on Facebook.” Your main domain yourdomain.com receives zero benefit.

Google treats subdomains as separate entities. This is well-documented. blog.example.com and www.example.com are treated as distinct properties in Google’s crawling and ranking systems. Even if facebook.yourdomain.com somehow became authoritative (it won’t—it’s just a redirect), that authority wouldn’t transfer to your main site.

Redirects don’t build your site’s authority. A redirect is not content. It’s not a backlink to your site. It’s a pointer saying “the thing you’re looking for is over there.” Google doesn’t reward domains for having more redirects.

The only scenario where this might indirectly help is if the vanity URL makes it easier for someone to find and then link to your actual website—but that’s a stretch.

Claim 2: “Promote Your Social Page” — True

GoDaddy states: “Anybody visiting your social subdomain will see your social media page.”

This is accurate and represents the actual value proposition. It’s called a vanity URL.

Use cases where this makes sense:

• Verbal communication: “Visit facebook.acme.com” is easier to say on a podcast than “facebook.com/acmecorporation/about”
• Print materials: A clean subdomain looks more professional on business cards than a long social URL with random characters
• Brand consistency: Keeping everything under your domain umbrella has a certain polish

Use cases where this doesn’t matter:

• Your website: Just link directly to your social profiles—visitors can click
• Digital marketing: Use proper UTM-tagged links, not vanity redirects
• SEO: As established, this does nothing

Claim 3: “Add to Your Main Domain Without Impact” — True

GoDaddy states: “Creating a social subdomain won’t affect anything currently connected to your domain.”

This is technically correct. DNS records are independent entries. Adding a CNAME or A record for facebook. doesn’t modify records for www. or your root domain. It’s a safe operation that won’t break your existing website.

How to Set This Up Yourself (For Free)

If you actually want social subdomains—for the legitimate vanity URL use case—you don’t need GoDaddy’s packaged feature. This is a standard DNS redirect that takes about two minutes.

Option 1: CNAME + Redirect Service

1. Go to your DNS provider (Cloudflare, Route 53, your registrar)
2. Create a CNAME record: facebook → your redirect service
3. Configure the redirect service to forward to your Facebook page

Option 2: Cloudflare Page Rules (Free)

If you use Cloudflare (which is free):

1. Add a DNS A record: facebook → 192.0.2.1 (dummy IP, proxied)
2. Create a Page Rule: facebook.yourdomain.com/* → Forwarding URL (301) → https://facebook.com/yourpage

Option 3: Simple Web Server Redirect

If you have any hosting:

# .htaccess for Apache
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^facebook\.yourdomain\.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://facebook.com/yourpage [R=301,L]

The Verdict

GoDaddy is packaging a trivial DNS feature as a value-add and misleading users about SEO benefits that don’t exist. This is a common pattern in domain registrar upsells—add perceived complexity to simple operations, then offer to handle it for you.

Do this if: You frequently share social links verbally, on podcasts, or on print materials, and you want cleaner URLs.

Don’t do this if: You think it will help your Google rankings. It won’t.

Never pay extra for this. It’s a two-minute DNS configuration you can do yourself. If GoDaddy is charging for this or positioning it as a premium feature, you’re paying for marketing theater.

The time you’d spend setting up social subdomains would be better spent creating content that actually builds your domain’s authority—content Google can index and rank.