Would putting a SAB's payments or billing page on a subdomain help SEO?

[mattstephenskc]

I'm curious if any of you have compared the effect on SEO of using a subdomain instead of a subdirectory for a service-area business' Payments or Billing page? Wouldn't have to be a portal per se, just the landing page for clients to go and pay their bills.

We have ours set up on a subdirectory currently, but I'm weighing the benefit of moving it to a subdomain.

In case it's useful to know, our payment processor is not built into our site. Our site's page links out to our payment processor portal.

Appreciate your help.

 

[Colan Nielsen]

Hi Matt,

That's not something we have tested and I think it depends on the use case. If you don't need the page to rank on Google I don't think it matters which option you use.

 

[mattstephenskc]

Hi Matt,

That's not something we have tested and I think it depends on the use case. If you don't need the page to rank on Google I don't think it matters which option you use.

We definitely don't need it to rank. A couple reasons I was considering moving it to a subdomain are:
1. We get a fair amount of traffic to it from clients going to pay their bills. I've been researching subdomains for email purposes (marketing, notifications, and transactional emails) and wondered if using an email subdomain that matches the subdomain of a page most closely associated with it might help with email deliverability. E.g., if we set up billing.domain.com for our payments page and support@billing.domain.com for our billing-related communications, I thought it might improve our sender reputation for those emails.
2. The billing traffic we get is irrelevant to our SEO purposes/strategy. Since that page is one of our most-visited pages, could it influence Google's interpretation of its relevance to the site's purposes for search? My understanding is that a site's most popular content can skew a search algorithm's assessment of its relative importance in the site's content hierarchy. Is that true? If so, why wouldn't it apply to domain.com/payments? Humans understand the distinction between transactional and content pages, but how do we ensure that the algorithms do?