Does Google treat sub.domains as different sites?

[westcoast]

Hi, we have a large area of our site that is reference content. It is useful, but when users come in externally from google, most of the time they immediately get their answer and then leave. This area thus has an extremely high bounce rate.... upwards of 90%.

We don't want to just remove the content, because it is both interesting and useful. But, we are afraid that the extremely high bounce area is hurting the site at large. It feels to me like google is penalizing our entire site as "thin content" or "high bounce" because of this one area.

My questions:

a) is my fear grounded in fact? can one part of a site hurt the entirety?

b) if yes -- if we move this thin / high bounce content to a sub.domain.com, will google treat it and our domain.com as two different sites? Or should we move it to an enirely other domain?

Thanks

[goodroi]

Generally, subdomains are treated as separate sites.

High bounce rate is not necessarily a bad thing. If someone searches for a simple answer like "what time is it" or "today's interest rate" or "phone number for local hospital" then a high bounce rate can be a sign of a good user experience. If someone spends 10 minutes on a website to find the hospital's phone number, there is a real problem. I would be more concerned with pogo sticking aka users coming to the site and quickly bouncing back to the search engines. Pay attention to bounce rate AND time on site, then manually review it to make sure it is not like the "phone number" type of situation that I already described.

You can get creative do something like the recipe sites. People used to visit those sites, grab the recipe and leave. Now many of them started to add a short story to the top of the page to give Google more content and create a stickier experience so user metrics increased, it also increased the real estate of the page giving them more places to sell ad space or drop in affiliate links. Users aren't a fan of this change because it slows them down but it works. The pages still good enough and satisfy users, Google has more ranking signals so the pages perform better & the site owners are making more money.