How is Google treating subdomains now ?

[iCyborg]

I know there was a report that nowdays google consider subdomains as a part of the site so blog.example.com should be considered as a part of the main site and will not have any ranking problems as it will also get the link juice from the main site.

how true is this ? how is google treating subdomains now days ?

[maximillianos]

It is my belief and understanding that Google views subdomains as a separate site with weak ties to the main domain.

My reasoning is because I believe I heard Dr Cutts talk about it sometime in the past, but also because I've seen multiple results from one site show up in SERPS on the same page when subdomains were used. Granted this site I am referencing was abusing subdomains. And they eventually got booted from G. But the point is G deemed them as different sites in their results.

Now by design, content from a subdomain should be considerably different than the content on the main domain, hence the reason for having a subdomain in the first place. So in theory you shouldn't see them both in the top 10 for the same query too often. Which was one of the red flags behind the site that shall remain unspoken that got the boot.

[tedster]

...it will also get the link juice from the main site

Assuming, of course, that there are links. There's no magic that spills over to a hostname just because the root domain is the same.

Subdomains figured heavily in some types of spam that Google needed to get a handle on - the total spam technique also used the fact that Google was indexing root pages very fast, even though the rest of a site would usually be sandboxed for quite a while. So the spammers said "How can I get tons of root pages? Use tons of hostnames (subdomains)."

Maximillianos is on the same track as I am here. A legitimate subdomain today often gets treated as something of a hybrid between a totally different domain and a part of the main domain. It's not 100% uniform - there are blogging platforms that offer each user a dedicated subdomain, for instance, and for those there's more of disconnect between the root domain and the user's subdomain.

So you're not likely to dominate an important SERP today by grabbing more than two positions via subdomains.

[motwguy]

At SMX advanced In June of this year, Cutts said that sub-domains and sub-directories would be traeated more equally by Google in the future. He offers more on this in a December 10 post at his site under /blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/

[pageoneresults]

Cutts said that sub-domains and sub-directories would be traeated more equally by Google in the future.

They've been saying that now for a couple of years and I'm looking at a search result now where there is one listing from the root domain and two more listings from hostnames. So, I think the key phrase in the above is "in the future" because I surely don't see them treating them the same as sub-directories, not one bit. Hostnames rock! Always have and probably always will if set up properly to begin with.

[jimbeetle]

motwguy, I think you might be misinterpreting that post from Matt. It was from last year when Google addressed the "host crowding" issue tedster spoke to above. In those cases certain searches would return many subdomain pages from sites such as craigslist and ebay, making them virtually useless. I didn't hear what he said at SMX, curious as to what G has planned in the future for handling subs vs. directories.

[tedster]

I surely don't see them treating them the same as sub-directories, not one bit.

A bit more precision in the analysis, please. Matt said "more like" and not "the same as".