Forum Moderators: open
i admit that i mainly post this here hoping GoogleGuy will read and reply ;-)
the situation:
i run a site who's main attraction are "nickpages", personal homepages that all have the same layout template. i'm a large site, there are more than 1 mio actively used "nickpages" with up to 20 pages each. google currently knows ~90,000 of those pages.
the main value of these sites is that by leaving guest book entries on other users' pages all of them are heavily interlinked (in total there are ~100 mio links = guestbook entries) but there are only 14,000 inbound links (checked on alltheweb).
so far everything is fine, some of my users even have PR6.
the problem:
i was just about to change all URLs from
to www.domain.com/u/nickname
as a service to my users when a SEO pro warned me that BIG G could see this as spam (different domains, heaviliy interlinked, not many inbound links). nickname.domain.com
do i have to refrain from doing this service to my users? does a subdomain count as a domain? any definitive answers?
you can find my personal email address and an example nickpage (actually my own, if you have very much time click on the guestbook entries to get to know all of my users ;-) in my profile.
just in case "size matters" for google answering individual questions: my site is europe's biggest mobile community with - audited - 180 mio page impressions a month and 4.5 mio registered users.
best regards,
muesli
[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 7:00 pm (utc) on Aug. 7, 2002]
guess why i hang around in such forums - haven't cared (and known much) about SEO until recently. implementation is about to start (and actually: my users will like it even more, as it increases usability).
muesli
hehe, only 14,000, I'm guessing but I think you will be OK.
g'n8, muesli
To add over a million subdomains and have groups of them cross link heavily would scare me. A lot.
I haven't been shown a new PR0 in a cross-linking structure for several months, and those I was shown were not subdomains, but otherwise this is very much what they looked like.
As much I think Google has not sorted out Pagerank- and Ranking boosts of (inter)linking-collections from real seperate sites, they might have sorted out Pagerank and ranking influences of heavy interlinking within subdomains of a site, without resorting to the december/january type of penalties. In this case Google might value links between sub-domains as site-internal, with a cut-off effect after a certain number of repetitions.
i post some example "nickpages" here so everybody can come to an opinion:
used ones:
<snip>
(ie. the new URLs will be *** etc.)
muesli
[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 7:01 pm (utc) on Aug. 7, 2002]
[edit reason] no site reviews or urls please in relation to spam queries [/edit]
I guess you have a rather extended outfit of what rfgdxm1 was refering to in this thread: [webmasterworld.com...]
that is: classmates all interlinking to each other. The main difference being, the classmates are not subdomaines of one site.
exactly. the thread just gave me the idea that i could be considered a spammer. otherwise i would just have thought no innocent websites could ever be banned.
muesli
Me too! Having said that I doubt very much that an penalty would automatically be placed, on a network that big a human will look at it first. Imho
Maybe large networks can't create bad neighbourhoods without a human check? Maybe Google aren't applying new penalties for cross-linking domains any more?
Ownership, IP allocation, server location, etc. have nothing to do with it.
[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 6:57 pm (utc) on Aug. 7, 2002]
[edit reason] Please no urls or site reviews. [/edit]
NFFC: I doubt very much that an penalty would automatically be placed, on a network that big a human will look at it first.
i wouldn't be sure. my site from google's point of view is only 90,000 pages big. nothing in a global perspective.
muesli
I agree, however split that content over 1000's of sub domains and big red lights will start to flash at the Plex. If it were me I'd take a peek before taking any action.
If it were me I'd take a peek before taking any action.
well, i do hope very much you're right! my site easily survives any human review but if there's none i could be smashed..
let me tell you my expieriences: i manage a system where people can easyly setup small standardpages in the format
username.sitename.com.
(Btw.: this is also some sort of mobile service ;)). Well, in fact these subdomains are no 'real' ones but redirects to a page like this: sitename.com/users/userpage.asp?id=nnnnn , cloaked by a 100%-Frame, still showing the subdomain in the adressbar.
They are *not* crosslinked, nor linked from the main-page. (That might be the most important difference to your case.) But all of them have a small 'powered by' link in the footer to our company-site.
There are about 10,000 of this pages around, some are linked from some private homepages, some are fairly dead. Some of them are showing up in google with the subdomain, some of them are showing up with the long, real url, most of them are not inside the index. Some of them have up to PR4, most PR1-2, a lot have a grey toolbar.
I really don't know how google is handling these pages, as i never understood how google is handling subdomains in general. But as all this pages link to our company-site and are all allmost identical, some people here might think this should cause a penalty. Till now: definately not. (knock, knock, knock... on wood)
