subdomains and link building

Does the links to the www site help the sub

[allanp73]

I am beginning to believe that local rank explains the death of many sites after Florida update. I have many sites which were really hit hard, however, one site in particular and it's subdomains are untouched by the updates. In fact because many of the competitors were filtered out have improved their rankings.
I spent a lot of time getting links to this site and even the sub-domains have a few links. I was surprised that the sub-domains didn't suffer all at because I have other sites with more links that were completely hammered. So are the sub-domains benefiting from the main domain's links?

I have a directory site built on a "widget theme". It domains all have unique content related to "city widget theme". These sub-domains have some links on their own (pr3 and 4s) and one link from the directory site (pr4 or 5). There are no links between the sub-domains just links back to the directory. I really want this sub-domains to do well, but getting links for almost a hundred sub-domains is difficult where as I could focus my efforts on building the links to the directory. I am curious if by building links to the directory site if all its sub-domains will benefit? How does Google view subdomains? Does it see them as separate sites or as part of the same site? What is the best way to build the local rank of all these sites?

[allanp73]

I could really use help with this. Does anyone have a similar situation? How does Google see sub-domains?

[rainborick]

I can't speak with any great authority, but everything I see tells me that to the extent that Google considers domains at all, Google treats subdomains as separate entities. Its always seemed to me that often when the discussions here refer to domains, the factors involved are usually more page-specific, or more precisely, URL-specific. The waters get too murky for me in messages about cross-domain links, IP addresses, and so on. I'm the kind of guy who prefers the simplest explainations, and in your particular case I think you're simply finding that the sites/domains that survived Florida et al. had sufficient numbers of good quality incoming and outgoing links to compete for your search terms.

[MikeBeverley]

Getting links to your subdomains will only help you marginally in search engine results. It will however help your site to get crawled.

You didn't mention anchor text at all so I get the feeling that you've got this all back to front. Are you simply trying to boost your PageRank?

[allanp73]

Mike,

Actually, the rank rank for all the submains is pr4. However, I worry about their local rank. It seems the post-Florida Google is all about local rank. Most of my links come from only a few IPs. I try to get as many links from different IPs but it is difficult. Many companies in my field host through their companies server and this greatly reduces the number of IPs eventhough there are many different sites. The problem is my industry is dominated irrelevent directory sites, which have many links from many different IPs. These directories generally don't even contain information about the topic that I target.

So my goal is to build local rank for these subdomains. Getting links to a directory style site seems easier than getting links to many commercial informational sites (subdomains). I just wondered if this would benefit these sites.

[allanp73]

"Are you simply trying to boost your PageRank?"

No, I'm looking at Local Rank (lr). Local Rank is different than Page Rank (pr) because it looks at where the links are coming from. Many can get high without getting links from many different IPs. This will lead to high pr but will not help lr. It seems that the current Google system drops sites with low lr even if they have high pr. The majority of the companies in my industry were affected. I managed to recover for some sites but most of my sites are still suffering. So I am trying to use the directory I have at my disposal in order to promote my subdomains. The goal would be to build the pr and lr of the directory which would then power the subdomains. However, I am not sure if this would work.
Does anyone have any experience with this?