About subdomains...

Does google take subdomains as separate domains?

[gutabo]

Hi!</shy greeting>

We have many subdomains accepted by Dmoz, I think cause they deal with completely different "widgets".
Thing is, I would like to know if Google(not Dmoz) accepts subdomains as separate domains, like, if a link from a subdomain is worth as much as a link from another domain?

TIA!

[takagi]

Google groupr pages per subdomain in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). But my guess is that since it is still one domain, the links will be seen as internal. The link text on an inbound link is more likely to be important than the link text from another subdomain, because the first one is usually easier to manipulate.

[soapystar]

i see no evidence that google see's subdomains as the same site. Since google will happily show all your subdomains in the serps and only two pages from one site then i think that says it all. I think this is wrong. it just means you should create every page as a subdomain instead of an internal page and google will happily show the whole lot per serp. I see this a lot and its so spammy.

[ciml]

For PageRank, I'm pretty sure there's no difference (even if the links are from the same fully qualified domain, PR should flow the same). Whether link text counts as much, I wouldn't like to bet on right now.

[berli]

Ahem, well, some of us host some sites on subdomains, because they're cheaper. (Why pay full freight for a hobby site in a tiny niche category, for example? Especially when it's something like myname.niche.com, so that everyone who's into "niche" immediately recognizes it as belonging to their category?)

The site of mine in question is also on a virtual domain, sharing an IP. (Fortunately all of us are (by necessity) non-commercial, so I'm not running much of a risk of one user--and I have no connection to these other users, other than that we share a common interest in this niche hobby topic--getting themselves banned in Google and doing the rest of us in.)

Also, there are many legitimate reasons that a single site would want to use subdomains. Suppose you offer a webmail service? Suppose part of your site is informational, and another part is commercial and you're using secure socket & all that kind of stuff? Suppose you want to start up a related service that is nevertheless seperate from your other services, and you create a subdomain instead of buying a brand-new domain name for it?

People who are going to be spammy are going to be spammy either way, but there are plenty of legitimate uses for subdomains. The best rule to live by, of course, is "what's best for the user?"

Going off to use groups.google.com, mail.yahoo.com and books.amazon.com . . .

[vincevincevince]

sub domains are treated as seperate sites, as the one in my profile illustrates when you do an allinurl:

[PatrickDeese]

I have seen plenty of evidence to support the fact the google (currently) views subdomains as distinct and separate sites.

The only exception to this is usually [domain.com...] and [domain.com,...] though from time to time ppl have reported googlebot considering it two different domains.

Good uses I see for subdomains are sites like berli pointed out, mail.yahoo, biz.yahoo etc.

Another good use is:

language1.domain.com
lang2.domain.com etc.

I have seen a lot of what I consider to be a spam technique, use of the same information scrambled around to "taste" different to google, then have www.domain.com and something like sub.domain.com show up side-by-side in the SERPs with the same information presented differently.

[europeforvisitors]

About.com is a good example of a domain that uses hundreds of subdomains successfully (and without penalty). Each of the several hundred "guidesites" is a subdomain: e.g., pregnancy.about.com, quilting.about.com, travelwithkids.about.com, and architecture.about.com.

[gutabo]

Thanks guys!

About.com is indeed a good example about using subdomains.

This.Site.IS.Great.

Thanks again!

[soapystar]

how can it be right that one domain creates subdomains of the same site and then gets large numbers of top listings for basically the same site?

[olwen]

I'm hoping to sell sites on subdomains. I have a domain name that I'll call widgeter.com Now if Mr Brown is a widgeter, and Mr Smith another, I'm hoping to persuade them to buy sites called brown.widgeter.com and smith.widgeter.com which I hope would provide ann easy way for small one-man businesses to have a website. I can't see they should be treated as the same site because Brown and Smith may actually be the deadliest of rivals, linked only by there good judgment in haveing me provide a small website.