Google consider subdomain as a different website?

[ashis06]

Is Google considering subdomain as a different website? All my internal pages are subdomain,done mod rewrite of url.

I have seen my subdomain in referral site list in Google Analytics. These are all internal pages how can they be treated as referral Sites?

Any suggestion?

[Quadrille]

Google has long treated subdomains as if they are separate domains, and so it does not see their pages as 'internal'.

Why do you see them as internal?

The position has changed recently (and may change again soon), but the best advice is not to create subdomains unless you have a reason to - for most uses, folders work just as well, and enables your site to take much better advantage of incoming links.

[ashis06]

Hi Quadrille,

Thanks for your response. I have a online shopping site. i have created all internal page as subdomain. For ranking purpose. Like: http://computer.domain.com/. This is not a different site, it's a internal pages of same domain. But how can this be treated as a separate domain?

[edited by: tedster at 4:03 pm (utc) on April 2, 2008]
[edit reason] de-link the example url [/edit]

[Quadrille]

I don't know what you mean by for ranking purposes.

If you mean you did it for SE benefit (rather than visitor benefit), then, as I explained, you've done the opposite to what you wanted.

The golden rule (for Google and most decent SEs), is DON'T do things specifically for SEs, make the best site you can for your visitors. The SEs try to simuate the visior experience, and while they don't always succeed, they are pretty good at spotting things that may confuse visitors, and your site will lose rankings because of them.

Multiple domain/subdomains rarely has any visitor benefit - so it rarely has SE benefit. One single domain is usually much more sensible, so it gets SE benefit.

Most of SEO really is common sense ;)

[tedster]

We had a very good discussion about subdomains just last fall, around PubCon time:

[webmasterworld.com...]

At that time, Matt Cutts mentioned they were changing some of the logic for subdomains:

For several years Google has used something called “host crowding,” which means that Google will show up to two results from each hostname/subdomain of a domain name. That approach works very well to show 1-2 results from a subdomain, but we did hear complaints that for some types of searches (e.g. esoteric or long-tail searches), Google could return a search page with lots of results all from one domain. In the last few weeks we changed our algorithms to make that less likely to happen.

[mattcutts.com...]