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This may be obvious to many of you but hosting bad sites on your own domain name is not a good idea.
I.e. if I allowed someone to put a site on http://badsite.seroundtable.com/ that would be a bad thing not just for badsite.seroundtable.com, but it would be bad for www.seroundtable.com. Or it potentially could be.
A Google Webmaster Help thread has Google's John Mueller saying just that.
John said:
With regards to other websites hosted within your website, Googlebot doesn't differentiate between accidentally hosting that kind of content within your site and doing it on purpose. If those are really sites that you do not want to be associated with, then I'd recommend making sure that they are not hosted within your domain. If those are sites that you want to fold into your main site, then I'd recommend setting up 301 redirects to the new URLs on your main site.
Again, this is kind of obvious to many but sometimes people need a reminder.
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.
Image credit to BigStockPhoto for broken screen
Comments:
Michael Merritt
02/18/2013 03:05 pm
I think it is final, solid proof that ANYTHING on any subdomain attached to your domain can affect your rankings. This might seem obvious, but for a long time the "common knowledge" has been that subdomains are treated as their own separate entity. This shows that it's not true.
Jon Wade
02/18/2013 03:30 pm
what is a bad site? There is a whole load of crap on blospot, but it still ranks for many searches. Why is that?
Michael Martinez
02/18/2013 05:01 pm
This appears to be a rare case where John Mueller and the Google Webmaster Forums team don't actually understand what is going on. The original poster complained that cPanel is creating all the subdomains -- and SHE IS CORRECT. cPanel users cannot disable this "feature" of an otherwise useful user interface (for technically inexperienced Website administrators). The original poster claims she is hosting Websites for friends on her account (an actually common practice). Those subdomains are automatically created as a result of adding more domains to the account. One must take steps to prevent the subdomains from being crawled but it is not always possible to do so. Google needs to lighten up on the cPanel users.
Le Béret Gascon
02/18/2013 07:17 pm
Yes, I work in the Internet field and specifically hosting, but it has always struck me as obvious, even logical, that in hosting a "bad" site on the subdomain, it is treated as filial of the main domain by the spider. That this happens to cPanel users as a result of cPanel's way of structuring this data is unfortunate for them but you can understand Googlebot's difficulty and you cannot expect Google "lighten up on cPanel users" when this could be seen as a clear case of positive discrimination. The lesson to learn is clearly not to "sub-let" shitty sites on your cPanel account.
ilkkan
02/18/2013 09:09 pm
Wtf ?!?! i realy bored due to google's instability
Michael Martinez
02/19/2013 12:59 am
The lesson to learn is to not be so arrogant toward people who don't think in terms of search engine guidelines.
Vic
02/19/2013 07:36 pm
Blogpost is owned by Google and Google rigs search to promote it's earnings and properties. They add book results, results from Google Ventures properties, Blogpost etc in the supposedly "organic search" area. Google is a criminal organization, what they are doing is fraud. You cannot say that you're unbiased and then rig search.