Matt Cutts Skips Over Subdomain Question!
Are links from subdomains treated as separate domains by Google?
I have been searching for an answer to this question for several months. My guess is ‘yes’. Subdomains have their own DNS; their own canonicalization, and this is the definition of a web namespace.
But wouldn’t that open a door for spammers to use wildcard DNS on a domain where they could then have an infinite number of subdomains giving backlinks to their “money sites”? Opinions from all webmasters are welcome and helpful, but is it possible to get an authoratative answer?
My search brought me to Matt Cutts’ blog where Matt is discussing ’subdomains and subdirectories’.
Who is Matt Cutts? If you don’t know who Matt Cutts is, today must be your first day as a webmaster!
It’s amazing how many questions go off topic on Matt’s blog, and it’s also amazing, to me, how many webmasters take Matt as their own personal SEO consultant by asking him questions that are 100% specific to their own little site.
Anyways, to my disappointment, Matt’s post is not on the separateness of subdomains, but rather, he is talking about Google’s “host crowding”, which is where you see several pages from the same TLD indented in the SERPs for any certain query. He also spends some time pointing out the pros and cons of using a subdomain vs a subdirectory. Nice post, but it doesn’t address my question.
What I did find interesting is that at least two webmasters that replied to his post have the same question as I do, but Matt did not answer them.
Adrienne Doss Said,
December 10, 2007 @ 1:28 pm
I’m really curious as to how this will play out in the SERPs. Here’s a real-life scenario:
One of my employer’s major competitors is using a different subdomains for each category of products … red-widgets.url.com, blue-widgets.url.com, etc. The theory is that since subdomains are treated as separate domains, their internal links were being treated as external links, thus giving them an extra boost in the SERPs.
Is it true that links between subdomains were (are?) being treated as external links? More importantly, did (does?) that give you any “extra credit” in the SERPs?
Federico Muñoa Said,
December 10, 2007 @ 2:34 pm
Adrienne, you just read my mind.
In my opinion, YES SERPs took subdomains links as external links.
Matt has not replied to these two yet.
Oh well, not answering each and every comment is understandable, after all, there are probably 100 comments to Matt’s one post and he does have a full time job.
I will just have to keep searching, and maybe do some testing of my own.
I have a feeling that Google might not want to talk about how they handle subdomains linking.
Bompa
Related posts:
Discussion Area - We'd love to hear your thoughts: