WOW! Big news today coming out of the Google Webmaster Central blog. Google is no longer looking at subdomains as being separate sites from the root domain. As it was before, subdomain.domain.com would have been treated as a totally separate site from domain.com. Links from the subdomain to the root domain would count as external links and a subdomain could rank alongside the root domain as a separate listing. This lead to many sites creating tons of subdomains, segmenting their site by subdomains and essentially spamming the search results for their brand and other queries with all of these subdomain properties.
Is this a response from Google in regards to this supposed Panda wrecking ball?
In fact, Hubpages was hit pretty hard by the Panda update and suggested that moving their weaker content onto subdomains is what got them out of Panda hell. But many feel that their strategy was not what improved their traffic and that around the time of their testing there were many Panda updates. And some others even say that Hubpages recovery is a facade.
Is this Google trying to reduce subdomain spam?
Well yes, I believe it is. Google recently rolled out the enhanced sitelinks and many feel that this was a way to combat subdomain spam. Barry Schwartz has a great round up post on the enhanced sitelinks if you want to read more about that.
Here is the table that Google is using to explain the change in internal vs. external links and how this change in how they see subdomains is affects it.
I am VERY interested to see how this all shakes out with organic rankings. My thoughts are that it could have a significant impact. But then again, Google could have manually, or via an algorithm, put in place filters to lessen the impact on some larger sites or brands.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
You completely misunderstood that article. They’re just talking about how they categorize internal/external links when they display them in Google Webmaster Tools. That’s completely different from an algorithm change based on subdomains.
Nathan, thanks for reading. I actually did not refer to this as an algorithm change. But it is a big change because it is not simply about how they display the data, it is a change in the way that they count links to a site. So sites with lots of subdomain links, or rather subdomains with many links from the root domain, will be heavily effected. My reference to the algo at the end here was guessing that Google may have lessened the impact this change has on some larger brand sites because Google has been showing them favor recently.
Hi Miguel,
Do you think this means that guest blog links from two different blogspot addresses are worth less now… or the same… or more?
All the best,
Brian
That’s a GREAT question and one I never considered. I would say that they are worth less now as they would not be treated as two links from two different domains, in the eyes of Google that is. Interesting.
If Google is now treating the domain and subdomain as the same thing and treating links as internal, are they also seeing updates to the subdomain as fresh content on the main domain. I guess what I’m trying to get an answer to is if I have blog.carolynfrith.com and http://www.carolynfrith.com, does the content I’m adding to blog.carolynfrith.com help with the seo of the main website? I just can’t find anyone who can answer this question. It’s driving me crazy!!!
That is a difficult question to answer because all of the tools out there treat subdomains differently. But in theory, based on things said by Google employees, new content on the subdomain should count towards the main domain. Many people, after being hit by the Panda update, moved lower quality pages onto subdomains and this seemed to work in getting their sites out of the Panda penalty. However, Google caught onto this and did not like it so they created this other filter to eliminate that and those people were penalized again. Also, Google changed the way that they count links from subdomains and they now count them together with the root domain. So those two things considered, I would assume that content on the subdomain will count (in Google’s eyes) for the root domain.