Google to Handle Subdomains as Regular Folders in Search Results
Search Engine Roundtable published an article this week with some information they received from Matt Cutts of Google regarding the way subdomains will be treated in Google’s search engine results pages (SERPS). This is what Matt announced at PubCon:
Google will very soon begin treating subdomains and subdirectories the same in this fashion: there will be only 2 total urls from a domain in any set of search results, so no more getting 3, 4 or however many spots via subdomains. We didn’t get any more information than just that basic heads-up.
Currently sub-domains are treated as a separate entity, allowing for websites to have multiple results show up. For example here is a screen capture of a navigational search for the query “Search Engine Roundtable“…
How Will This Affect Business?
Search Engine Land has some interesting insight into the implications of a change like this. In the following example the top 3 results for a search on “macbook” are displayed.
You will notice the 4th result is from the store.apple.com subdomain. Losing these types of subdomain results could cause significant traffic loss and a noticeable decline in profits for some big business.
How Will This Affect Users?
Some say this will allow for more diversity and better search results on the whole. There are some interesting comments from both sides of the fence on this issue at this Sphinn page. In light of all this, the Google bots are doing some good things such as the recent increase in possible “Sitelinks” for popular websites.
Popularity: 2% [?]
December 20th, 2007 at 7:37 am
Where do you get all those great looking images? Love the money made boat!
December 20th, 2007 at 4:36 pm
From what I’ve read this was applied for a few weeks already and there were no changes on rankings. Because Google will just make it harder to rank more pages from the same site, including subdomains, not limiting the listings to just 2 on the first page.
So not so many changes in my opinion…
December 20th, 2007 at 7:32 pm
So I’m guessing that there will be an exception for Blogger blogs? There’s no way that they could all rank as the same site.
December 21st, 2007 at 4:36 am
Yes definitely the rule won’t apply on Blogger blogs
Would be absurd
December 22nd, 2007 at 1:26 pm
Interesting, Google owns blogger, so I am assuming they thought of that problem.
March 16th, 2008 at 10:59 pm
Sometimes, it appears that Google is anti-little man! The treatment of subdomains as separate entities helps the little man.
I wonder if this will affect one way backlink from a subdomain to a root domain of a website.
I hope not.