Thanks for sharing this information. Question for you. How does something like this effect Craigslist.org when Google decides to make this new “update”? Craigslist.org currently provides a subdomian for each sub location.

Hi Nick. I would like to thank you for writing this blog. I have been using it as reference for a while now and It has helped me with my work.

Good work!
Καλή δουλειά!

Cheers

Thanks Spyros. Glad it helps.

Chase, I don’t think this will affect Craigslist, Blogger, StumbleUpon, or any other networking site that uses subdomains for user profiles and the like. These sites have legitimate uses for their subdomains. This will affect sites like eBay that use subdomains for no apparently good reason. If you go to eBay, for instance, and click on a category you’ll be taken to a subdomain. Why not a folder on the primary domain? Because, until now, Google counted subdomains as separate websites and it allowed sites like eBay to dominate the SERPs with its subdomains when it could be using folders to achieve the same business objectives. Craigslist is more or less not-for-profit. Blogger uses subdomains for the free blogs that it provides - again, not-for-profit. Sites that like probably won’t be affected.

This is a very good move for consumers. It will reduce SERP’s from being dominated by large coroporations. We work with small to medium businesses and having first page results ia a critical success factor for many of them.

In my opinion the excessive use of sub-domains is essentially corporate spamming. It does not improve SERP quality and serves only to clog the flow of information. Hooray for Google!

a new filter to make sure only two results of a domain (no matter subdomain or folder)

So how does blogger and criag’s list skip that statement?

My question is related to this. I am currently building a blog directory. Real estate blogs were to be on one subdomain like realestate.blogs.pn. Internet Marketing blogs would be on Internetmarketing.blogs.pn, etc. etc.

That directory just makes good sense. According to the statement by cutts, even if I used folders as hierarchy, it would still hurt me to have any hierarchy whatsoever.

Blogspot.com has a million subdomains. So only tweo blogger blogs can get listed?

This filter really seems to be hurtful to legitimate uses of subdomains. I ralize some abuse subdomains, but punishing everyone for the actions of a few is a bad business plan.

People abuse adsense and I don’t see them filtering out all use of adsense.

And another quest. .co.uk all domains on .co.uk are subdomains.

How does google handle that?

Happy to see Google might be making a decision that helps the little guy (for once….)

Maria

It remains to be seen whether this policy will affect every use of subdomains. Based on past behavior of Google, I think they will continue to improve the policy to include reasonable exception.

I’ll take the wait and see approach. In the meantime i’ll continue to build websites that make sense regardless of google’s policies as I always do. Luckily I learned how to get traffic and make money on the web before google was even a portal. Anytime someone bases their entire marketing plan all on what google changes or does, they are just asking for it.

There are actually other ways to get targeted traffic. Google has not yet taken over the world. I like to think of google as brain and Vint Cerf as Pinky.

[…] I posted about Matt Cutts commenting on subdomains. I wasn’t the only one, but it appeared to me that he was saying sudomains were going to be […]