I have been telling people to stay away from using sub-domains for well over a year now. The frequency of search spammers using sub-domains to attempt to manipulate search results is growing by leaps and bounds. I have been saying the search engines are going to make adjustments to their algorithms to combat this problem eventually. Well, “eventually” may just be upon us.

Last week at PubCon in Las Vegas, Matt Cutts of Google mentioned that the search engine giant will soon be treating sub-domains different in their results pages. At first it was reported that sub-domains were to be treated as folders, however in a comment thread over at Sphinn, Matt Cutts explained that this was a bit of an over statement. Here’s what he meant …

“This isn’t a correct characterization of what Google is looking at doing. What I was trying to say is that in some circumstances, Google may move closer to treating subdomains as we do with subdirectories.”

Additionally, a poster named Tedster a Sphinn spoke to Matt directly and had this comment:

“Matt said that Google will make it HARDER to get that 3rd result in a given search, and then increasingly harder for every result after that. But it will not be the exact same treatment that subdirectories get”

Exactly how this is going to play out is still up in the air. Matt promised to clarify things “at some point” after he gets back from the convention. This does bring to mind a number of questions and clarification is needed for sure. I doubt that most of it will come from Matt or Google, however, our industry is very good at analyzing an issue and making its own clarifications. I have one basic question related to this … Till now, sub-domains have basically been treated as separate web sites. How will this change if at all?

The real news in all of this is that Google is starting to make changes in how it handles sub-domains. It’s a tricky issue to solve as eradicating the sub-domain spam would surely hit quite a few legitimate users of sub-domains as well. This said, I don’t think this is the last change we will see in the handling of sub-domains. While this change will help eliminate the multiple listings in a single SERP, there are still the issues of the topical content spam so many sub-domains are filled with. I am looking for a paid linking type solution to appear which will selectively ignore sub-domains based on the quality of their content.

To repeat what I have said for quite some time now, if you can avoid using sub-domains, do it.

Article Permalink

http://www.appliedseo.com/beginning-of-the-end-of-the-sub-domain-era/

Article Trackback Link

http://www.appliedseo.com/beginning-of-the-end-of-the-sub-domain-era/trackback/

• Share Via:
• Del.icio.us
• Digg
• StumbleUpon
• Mixx
• Facebook