Will google penalize me for hundreds of subdomains

I know this question has been asked but not this way

[newborn]

Ok to subdomain or not subdomain and how Google will treat it.

I have a great type in address website, however recently one of my friends said NB can you make a free website for me I said sure but you would have to pay. Then I remebered subdomains and that I could give him
hisname.mysite.com

Then I thought guys at my school would love their own site or blog for that matter and that I could build those free and they supply the content. The trouble is on my dorm alone there are over 600 fellow students. The question is would Google look unfavorably on me adding say 600 new subdomains each with about 10-15 pages all about that person still. What should I do. If google does not want me to do this I have not seen it as any type of spam in their WHAT NOT TO DO'S.

Has anyone utilized this type of thing before I know that Im not Albert Einstein so somebody must be doing it or has and what are the + - for Google Ranking for my main domain.

HELP OUT THERE...

[ashear]

There are many great sites that use sub domains and do not have problems, here are a few things to think about.

Sub domains are considered new domains, thus their authority to rank in competitive spaces does not exist.

Are these sub domain sites targeted for the same countries that your primary domain is? If it’s a .com domain and one of your users wants to rank in the UK market they will need a UK IP address for their sub domain. A difficult process.

You could make these users folders within your normal site, however if you do not link to these pages in a logical manner they will not have enough weight to be completive.

I hope this helps.

[pageoneresults]

Sub domains are considered new domains, thus their authority to rank in competitive spaces does not exist.

Hmmm, let me expand on that. Sub-domains are considered separate entities and their authority in some instances may outrank the root domain. There is no problem in ranking sub-domains in competitive spaces.

Site architecture, structure, etc. will all have a role in the overall process of sub-domaining. Heck, Yahoo! and MSN will show two, three, sometimes four subdomains from the same root domain in the results. I have clients who happily enjoy those top 3, 4 and 5 spots in some instances. ;)

[newborn]

Hold on guys all the subdomains will be for people from my country, its actually an about us mini sites. So say Page one (Assuming thats your real name)you would be pageone.mysite.com.

This mini site would be all about you. Your name contact info, resume, family member, your kids. Etc. It will also allow me to have lecturers download home work so its kind of a major utility site that I wanted, with many mini-sites.

What I wanted to know is if i have
person1.mysite.com
person2.mysite.com
person3.mysite.com
person4.mysite.com
person5.mysite.com
etc.

If Google will frown on this and penalize www.mysite.com?

[leadegroot]

If you add several thousand domains a day then you should set off a trigger (and hopefully they have actually added those tests after the faux pas early this year!)
However, anything added at the speed you can do it manually will not be a problem.
I assume you are going to do it all by hand and it will happen as your dorm mates go 'gee, that sounds good' and get back to you?
I don't think you have a problem :)
The issue isn't the number of subdomains (well, 100s of 1000s would be different :) ) its the speed at which you add them.
The question is do you look Real or not.

[newborn]

I was thinking using about 100 different web templates and using them sparsely. But I will be asking for anywhere from 48-72 hours fo0r design and upload. Im using a regular form to capture name, content, pictures and all that jazz. And 24 hrs to ammend the site.

When I think about it I better recruit two guys to help...so concensus can be done just not too quickly..Thanks guys

[tedster]

If the new subdomains are not using any tricks to promote themselves, and they are mostly personal pages, I can't see this tripping any flags. Trouble comes more from how subdomains are used, and not just the fact that they exist.

I have not seen it as any type of spam in their WHAT NOT TO DO'S.

But spammers have historically made heavy use of subdomains, so don't assume a green light for anything and everything. Google's Webmaster Guidelines [google.com] are general enough to cover manipulations of all kinds, no matter what the url looks like.

So, if the people you give subdomains to get spammy with them, then yes, you might have trouble with the principal domain. If they stay clean, so do you.

[Haecceity]

You probably want to avoid having the subdomains having links pointing back to the main domain, just to be on the safe side. And don't interlink them. Apart from that I think you'd be fine. Basically you're just setting up a bunch of unrelated sites. No problem.

[inbound]

Why not buy one new domain to be the source for all subdomains? This way you spend $10 a year and all of the new sites are not on your old domain.

[ashear]

Unless you are in the middle of a linking scheme, these “separate entities” eloquently put by the way "pageoneresults". Will have nothing to do with one another, make sure that the content is different on each one as well.

[BigDave]

Go look at livejournal, wordpress and blogspot. It isn't going to get you in trouble. Nor will natural interlinking between those subdomains.

But if you are trying to use those subdomains to with their widely vaired content to somehow help the rainking of your main domain, there might be some disappointing side effects when google decides the theme of your site. Google will not start considering it a community site.

If your www.mysite.com domain is about something unrelated to the community, you might lose some of your ranking in your desired area.

[jd01]

Maybe I am missing something, but if you are promoting your friends personal pages, what exactly are you trying to rank them for?

Or, are you just trying to make sure cool-type-in.com stays in the index?

(If you don't need them to rank, do it however works best from an 'ease of use', 'ease of update' point of view. No point in wasting time making sure sub-domain that will never (in most cases) rank or be optimized can rank or be optimized. IMO anyway.)

Justin

[newborn]

Guys its really based on creating a great presence, I have started to get good feedback already on the move but have encountered a few problems, I can let all the websites look the same....I need new templates...where to get them only heaven knows, then data capture and then to monetize each page.

Any thoughts on how to do this.

[jd01]

I would consider using a CMS as mentioned above.

If you are worried about rankings, myfriends-name.cool-name.com is probably not the best naming convention, unless you are optimizing that sub-domain for myfriends-name.

At the same time, cool-name.com/myfriends-name isn't much help either, but it keeps you from having 'new'.cool-name.com every time a new user signs up.

I would go with the ease-of-use solution, because it is probably the most 'natural' way to do it, and if your ultimate goal is to rank as a 'community' site, you need to be recognized as a 'community' site.

I think if you are trying to create a 'community' you are better to stay with a single domain, unless, of course, the simplest, easiest, most used, essentially 'natural' solution for 'community' creation is to use sub-domains, then I think you should use sub-domains.

Justin

Added: I thought there was a cms mentioned.
I can think of successful communities using both types of systems, so it might be it doesn't matter that much if you set your system up correctly from the start.
I prefer the ones with directories, because they usually rank faster when I put content on them.

[cenkbut]

Hi everyone,

I had a similar issue. I changed my dynamic pages which shows results by cities, which is around 20.000 pages. So the pages looked like
london.mydomain.com, manchester.mydomain.com etc, which shows unique results to my user. What happened after that, this triggered google to penalize me somehow not to rank in first 3 pages of google including my domain name search.

These pages are content rich and essential for my website but obviously google traffic is important, too. So what must I do to rank better in google, leave everything as it is and wait for google to remove the penalty or remove all the pages or remove the subdomains?

I'll appreciate your advises