The return of the Subdomain

Boom time for sites with subdomains

[elguiri]

Subdomains used to work wonderfully in Google, and were, for a time, a spammers trick to get dozens of pages into the SERPS for one term. Then, as with most easy to replicate tricks, it stopped working.

I'm now seeing for some moderately competitive terms a few (high PR) sites scoring big with their subdomains. For the search term "widgets" they have 10-20 results in the top 50 with:

blue.example.com/widgets/index.html
red.example.com/widgets/index.html
green.example.com/widgets/index.html

etc.

Clearly this bugs me as a competitor, but these are not good SERPs for the user either.

Has this been happening for some time and I've been missing it? Any other experiences to report?

[Web_Savvy]

We've recently experienced something on this that might be of interest:

We launched a subdomain on a one year old primary domain. Let's say the domain is foo123.com and it deals with 'blue widgets' (none of these terms occur in the domain).

The subdomain we launched is shopping.foo123.com. (This was in December 2006.)

Now, 'shopping blue widgets' happens to be a reasonably competitive phrase, with some 35 million + results.

Within a week or 10 days from start, the subdomain started ranking in top 50 for 'shopping blue widgets'.

We've not had much prior experience with subdomains vis-a-vis Google so I can't comment on any possible changes, but hope what I've described would be of help to OP and others.

[elguiri]

Curious.

The results I'm seeing for this competitor are as astounding as they are frustrating.

My bet is that, following the example of what I'm seeing, were you to create:

buy.example.com
search.example.com
best.example.com

etc. as well you'd probably boost your traffic even more. You might even rank well for blue widgets - at least until the next algo tweak.

[edited by: tedster at 6:33 pm (utc) on Mar. 13, 2007]
[edit reason] use example.com [/edit]

[Errioxa]

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System: The following 2 messages were spliced on to this thread from: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3283849.htm [webmasterworld.com] by tedster - 1:43 pm on Mar. 16, 2007 (EST -4)

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Lately I believe that google is giving more importance to to the links that come from subdomains.

We know that a subdomains for Google is like another different web, but this it has incovenientes as the same Ip.

I believe that in these last months it is giving very much value to the links from subdomains.
What do you think?
Unlike the internal links, which I believe that they do not have very much value for Google at the moment.
Have you noticed substantial changes in the results during this last week?

Can it be Big Daddy 2007?
Maybe I am just going crazy...

[Jhet]

These are my thoughts on using subdomains. If anyone has other thoughts on them I’d like to hear them. We are contemplating using subdomains.

Positives:
Treated as a separate domain

Negatives:
Matt Cutts pet peeve is subdomain spam (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/2006/01/)

If the subdomain is banned the main domain may be banned

Some hosting companies don’t allow them on Windows hosting

A lot of directories won’t link to subdomains