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Sub-Domains For SEO Is No Good
January 18th, 2010 by Jon Waraas


I used to use sub-domains a ton for my websites, since Google used to treat a sub-domain like its own website it was pretty easy to rank sub-domains for small terms. I would do the link building work for each subdomain ( keyword.domain.com ) and then rank the sub-domains for long tailed keywords. Well Google recently changed something to make it harder to rank sub-domains for search terms, so 2 weeks ago I switched 3 of my websites over from the sub-domain way to a normal link structure like domain.com/keyword.php.

It took me 1 whole day per website to get everything changed over including the 301 redirect work, server dns changes, updating the links within the site, etc. I then did a bunch of link building work after making the changes and as of today I have doubled my traffic for those 3 websites and also double my revenue (Jan is killing Dec revenue wise :) ). I am still not even half way done with the link building work, so that is good news :)

But anyways I am not sure why Google changed how they look at sub-domains, but I suggest that you change over any website that rely on sub-domains for SEO, I would switch over to the normal link structure way, it has doubled my traffic.

Anyone have any experience with your sub-domains losing there SERP’s ranking recently?

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5 Comments

Comment by Web Design Beach
2010-01-18 16:45:14

That definitely proves that recent changes in google’s algorithm negatively hit sub domains. Which is surely not strange, as many like you, did the same job creating a tons of subdomain websites :)

 
Comment by Web Design Beach
2010-01-18 16:46:28

And i forgot to add it’s nice to hear you have fast managed to fix that problem ;)

 
Comment by PS3
2010-01-19 10:58:48

Very interesting! I don’t rely on any subdomains but I wonder why google don’t like them? Maybe we should ask Matt Cutts lol.

 
Comment by tweetivism
2010-01-20 15:12:15

Makes sense as a way to combat people going nuts with parasites — the real question is are authority base domains that use subdomains negatively affected (i.e. Blogger)

 
Comment by flights to pakistan
2010-01-29 15:19:42

ive exprienced this problem my self in the past, i had a few subdomains but they didnt get picked up by google.

 

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