Move tags pages to subdomain because of Panda?

[ckissi]

Hi all,

Google is recommending to get rid of thin pages. In fact I receive about 20% of my traffic to these pages. I'm thinking to move them from :

www.domain.com/tag1.html to tag1.domain.com

Its something like Hubpages did with their author's pages.
What do you think about this ? Can this help with panda ?

[tedster]

You'll only know if you try. It doesn't sound like you would do much damage, at any rate. However, here are some things to think about:

1. If 20% of your traffic comes to those tag pages (I assume you mean search traffic) then it doesn't sound very much like they are really the core of the problem.

2. Google itself has not used the words "thin content" with regard to Panda. That's a common re-writing of their actual description which was "shallow content". Try this blog post from Amit Singhal [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com] for a more detailed description of what "shallow" can mean.

3. Tag pages are pretty common and many sites that use them were not hit by Panda.

[simonnreynolds]

You will create alot of domain names if you do it tag1.domain.com

I have been thinking of doing the same thing but moving from domain.com/tag1 to tags.domain.com/tag1..

Thus removing low quality content from my main domain and still generating high reach/long tail traffic from my tag pages.. (on a sub domain)

[aristotle]

Doing this would create a confusing and complex site structure. In my opinion it's generally best to have a simple structure.

[YieldBuild]

At HubPages we noindexed, followed tag pages, but if I were going to move tag pages to subdomains, I'd probably start by creating tag.domain.com/ and put all tags under a single subdomain instead of a subdomain for every tag page.

I wouldn't do it all at once as well. See if you can move a meaningful sample size and give it some time to set in

[aristotle]

It's really hard for me to imagine how this type of change could help improve a site's Google rankings. This would be an illogical convoluted structural design that introduces unnecessary complexity to the site and doesn't benefit the user in any way that I can see.

[ckissi]

I know about site that did it that way, all tags were moved to its own subdomain.
Now this site increased the post panda traffic and it tripled.

I expect that if you move those tags to single subdomain you will probably hurt it again because some of those pages are thin, some of them aren't. So those thin will hurt entire tag.domain.com again.