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November 6, 2006

Subdomains & The SEO Benefit in Google, Yahoo, & MSN

A relatively old thread at Search Engine Watch Forums discusses what the benefits of subdomains are in terms of SEO. There are many examples given, including that subdomains are often considered separate sites by Google and the other engines. That is key.

Danny Sullivan understands that subdomains are still perceived "as standalone sites and not necessarily related to a main domain."

The most important part of a subdomain is that because of the statement above, your results in the search listings won't be collapsed under the main result. You won't get those cool but pesky sitelinks, and that one sub result. You may get the first 10 results if the search term is right.

This may just be the right strategy for a company that has very bad publicity about their company name and they want to push down the bad results in Google, Yahoo, & MSN.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.



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posted rustybrick in Search Engine Optimization at November 6, 2006 7:24 AM Comments (3)

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Comments

Subdomains are still an important factor for getting higher rankings. But you need to use them carefully. Google wants quality content. And if your site is new, its hard to create good content for both your main domain and your subdomain.

 

Posted by Optimalisering at November 6, 2006 13:50

Whether a site uses sub-domains or not does not appear to affect the algorithmic decision to show it using what Google calls "sitelinks" (the collapsed or clustered results you refer to). I know of several popular, large content sites that use sub-domains which receive sitelink listings AND also get multiple listings in the search results (by sub-domain).

Matt Cutts did imply a few weeks ago on his blog that Google may be taking a closer look at sub-domain spam. Whether that affects all sub-domain listings is anyone's guess, but I would favor the idea that Google takes a conservative approach to cleaning up sub-domain spam since many sub-domains are truly independent, separate sites.

 

Posted by Michael Martinez at November 6, 2006 14:10

i still dont understand how come www is considerd as subdomain

 

Posted by prasanth at February 28, 2008 01:41

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