A Little Subdomain Basics
June 2, 2008 By: Justin | 2 commentsRecently I caught hell from people taking part in the BloggerUnleashed contest. I’m taking part and I recently make the stance that I will not accept post comments from competition bloggers. It started because someone was mirroring my keywords and anchored them as his name in a comment on my post (they’re do follow). The result would be me linking out with my keyword. I said I would not do it and people seemed to not like it. Some disagreed with me. Some thought I was being an ass.
Well, I don’t know nearly as much about making money online as Vic, but I know a bit about SEO. I read a ton on the topic and knew what I was talking about. So I want to give a brief lesson in subdomains for all the BU people who have a problem with my choice.
Before I start though, I do want to say this. Its MY competition blog, even if I deleted your comment without reason, I am allowed.
A Bit About The Contest
The contest is about 80+ bloggers hosted on subdomains on BloggerUnleashed.com. Vic is teaching specific monetization methods and we’re competing to see who gets the best results. The winner goes to the New Media Expo thing in Vegas.
The blogs are all on subdomains like this: name.bloggerunleashed.com
Difference Between TLD, Subdomains, and Folders
A TLD is a Top Level Domain and is the normal domain you think of. For example, my TLD is seozombie.com
A subdomain is in the format name.seozombie.com
And lastly a folder is the standard seozombie.com/folder/
A TLD is its own domain. A folder is a sub folder of the TLD. A subdomain is a domain within a TLD and is a crossbred between a TLD and a folder.
A subdomain is seen as a “separate space” on the net. It builds its own authority. It does pick up authority from its parent domain and the TLD and subdomain should not be seen as separate (though they’re more separate than a folder would be)
Google’s Changes to Subdomains
In the past, Google treated subdomains as entirely different sites. Because of this, it would allow a site to dominate multiple spots in search results for some search terms. This would allow search marketers to domainate a keyword through subdomains. So at the end of 2007 Google made a change in the way they treated subdomains. Google now links subdomains from the same TLD. They’ve lost much of their ability to domainate more than two spots in a result (the two spots would be a result and an intented result). So if there are multiple results from the same TLD that can rank for the term, even if they’re subdomains, it is very likely only 1 subdomain will show. This reduces the ability for marketers to manipulate using subdomains.
Several people over at BU seemed to not trust my authority on the topic, so I took the time to hunt down some posts on the topic.
What Others Have to Say
“Google is going to start treating subdomains like subfolders, and limit the number of results from any site to two”
Aaron Wall from SEOBook
“Now that’s changing. Google is no longer treating subdomains (blog.widgets.com versus widgets.com) independently, instead attaching some association between them. The ranking algorithms have been tweaked so that pages from multiple subdomains have a much higher relevance bar to clear in order to be shown”
Vanessa Fox From Search Engine Land
“For several years Google has used something called “host crowding,” which means that Google will show up to two results from each hostname/subdomain of a domain name. That approach works very well to show 1-2 results from a subdomain, but we did hear complaints that for some types of searches (e.g. esoteric or long-tail searches), Google could return a search page with lots of results all from one domain. In the last few weeks we changed our algorithms to make that less likely to happen in the future”
Matt Cutts from GOOGLE
Relation to the Contest
So how does this relate to Vic’s contest? Well if I am working a keyword and another blog on the BU domain is targeting the keyword, than their are 4 possible pages that could return in the results (our home pages and our posts). According to the change Google made last year, it is very unlikely we will both be able to rank for it. When dealing with subdomains there is a limitation on the number of slots available for a specific keyword. I chose not to link out to another page on the same TLD because I do not want to dilute my authority and increase the chance that the other blogger’s page ranks in place of mine. When you deal with subdomain, you must understand that Google places limitations on them and that must be taken into consideration when marketing the site. In the case of this contest, the ranking of one blog prevents the ranking of another (to a certain degree). It isn’t a matter of ranking higher or lower, but a matter of ranking or NOT. There are special cases when Google’s rule has exceptions, but I don’t want to play around with unknown exceptions.
My Conclusion
Knowledge is power in the world of SEO and Internet Marketing. I have multiple reasons I do not want to link out to other competition blogs, but this reason alone is solid enough. I haven’t made a name for myself yet in the world of SEO, so you’re welcome to visit the sites of the three quotes I provided. Those sites are considered professionals and authorities in this field.
Note: Not wanting to link out is not personal. If you’re a competition blogger and want to work together on our own domains, I’d be happy to team up. The competition is not normal marketing and not “real world”. We’re working within a predefined environment created by Vic. In addition, the point is to out perform the other 80 bloggers. I’m treating my competition blog a little different than my own sites. If I sound rude, it is simply due to agitation with others feeling they have a right to complain about or question the methods I use on my site.
Filed Under Bloggers, Online Success, SEO, Search Engines |
Tagged With Bloggers, features, Online Success, SEO, subdomains, ZEO Zombie
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My question is that does inbound links to a particular subdomain also give value to the TLD or www domain?
So would a bunch of links to
blog.mydomain.com contribute to the ranking of mydomain.com and www .mydomain. com?
Any ideas?
Its hard to predict some times. Domains are a cross b/t a separate domain and a folder. Building authority for the subdomain does build authority for domain, but not as much as if it was a folder. It also depends on how much you interlink them. If you link the blog to the other pages, it will pass authority.