Subdomain success - Panda Recovery

[danwhitehouse]

Today I have noticed a key industry site that has started the change from CC TLDs to sub domains on a .com site for their regional satellite sites.

A few of our sites have links on these sites generating some traffic to our site(s).

In 2012 I've noticed that traffic is coming from sub domains rather than CC TLDs with CC TLds being phased out and 301-d across the net pointing to the new sub domains on the .com site.

I understand that creating a series of sub domains on a root domain was a key strategy to recover from a slap from Panda. In this case the site(s) that we are getting the traffic from did not have that much of an adverse affect due to Panda (based on public information). But who knows, their might have been quite a lot of affect behind the scenes.

Ok to the point..

The traffic that we are getting from these sites has increased so much that we are considering the same strategy with a series of authority CC TLDs that we own.

But should we? If it aint broke, dont fix it right?

[tedster]

I agree with you - if you're not broken, don't try to fix anything at all. The ccTLD approach can work very well - and so can the subdomain approach.

The idea of using subdomains to address Panda demotions was about websites that had uneven content quality on a single domain. By segregating different authors or content types into dedicated subdomains, the weaker quality content no longer drags down the great content.

So it's not that subdomains are inherently a better way to go in every case. They can, however, address certain specific challenges that Panda might throw at some businesses. However, if you don't see a problem related to Panda updates, I would not invest all the resources it takes to execute a big shift. You might even hurt your actual situation.