Matt Cutts Clarifies Subdomain Law

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Monday, December 10, 2007 Comments (1)

Saturday 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 effected in a big way. As it turns out, it was really subtle change and it had already taken place. Nobody noticed. Including me.

Cutts explained himself a little more in detail today on his blog. It makes more sense now.

The real gist of the change has to do with making certain searches more relevant. In his own words:

This change doesn’t apply across the board; if a particular domain is really relevant, we may still return several results from that domain. For example, with a search query like [ibm] the user probably likes/wants to see several results from ibm.com. Note that this is a pretty subtle change, and it doesn’t affect a majority of our queries.

What it appears like Google is trying to do with this change is to prevent several results from the same domain appearing in SERPs when those results are similar in nature. In other words, it might not be duplicate content but the content is close enough in nature that one or more of the results really doesn’t add any value for the searcher. If I’m understanding this change correctly, then that’s how I’d interpret it.

Comments (1)                      Category: SEO                      

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1 Comment

Comment by namecritic

Made Monday, 10 of December , 2007 at 9:37 pm

In that case i’m all fo9r it and I can build my blog directory the way I want to and it shouldn’t be affected. Thanks for the followup!
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