Sub Domain with Non-Relevant Content

[kmayer]

Greetings,

Our company has a sub domain that hosts content for our clients (through our content management system). When I run a site:example.com at Google, it returns 100’s of entries which are actually our clients files (mostly docs, pdf, and images). Those files really are not related to our site per se, but our clients site. Does that cause any negative effect on our seo? If so, what is the best way to deal with?

[edited by: tedster at 1:26 am (utc) on Apr 27, 2010]
[edit reason] switch to example.com - it can never be owned [/edit]

[tedster]

Hello kmayer, and welcome to the forums.

If you do a site: operator search without any hostname (subdomain) the results will always show URLs from any hostnames Google has indexed. If you include the hostname (even "www") in your query - site:www.example.com - then that will limit the results.

Your situation is a small scale mirror of a domain like wordpress.com (and many others) where a large number of different user blogs are served on a dedicated hostname (subdomain) under one parent domain, and that parent domain also holds its own dedicated content as well.

As far as I know, each hostname is indexed as a "separate website" unless there is cross-linking.

[kmayer]

Thanks for the reply tedster. Sounds like I don't need to worry about it. Thanks for the welcome too. I'll become a paying member shortly i'm sure.

[kmayer]

Bing Webmaster Tools is showing some of the files in that subdomain as being top pages in our website. That leads me to beleive it is a problem with Bing. What do you think? There is cross linking in that those site link to us and we link to them.