Forum Moderators: open
For example, I have several Japan-relates sites as subdomains, each has unique daily or weekly content and each have the following amount of links
news.mysite.com........2740 links
cityguide.mysite.com...1390
forum.mysite.com.......1400
The total for these links is 5530 links. I actually have a few more subdomains in there too.
My site is linked as 35th under the keyword "Japan". The No 1 site for the keyword is a single domain
No 1 ....4520 links
No 2 ....2060
No 3 ....1550
No 4 .....309
No 5 .....372
No 6 ....5340
No 7 ..16,400
No 8 ....2760
No 9 ....4730
I don't understand why sites with less backlinks are higher than us and we are 35th. Surely Google should take some consideration of the total links to all sudomains.
We have more page views (according to published figures) and a higher Alexa ranking.
I have contacted google about this and their response was "our algorithm is correct". If anyone could help me understand I would greatly appreciate it.
It is a very difficult thing to judge as there are so many influencing factors. But on the whole my sub-domains are performing inline with my equivalent top level domains, I don't see any reason to quit that strategy.
SN
I hear your moral viewpoint. But I have to tell you that Google does not share it.
Google doesn't do "domain rank". It just does page rank. Except for certain kinds of spam control (artificial link manipulation scams, or perhaps duplicate page detection) it ignores domain altogether.
SN
Is there a simple way to check PR for thousands of links?
SN
In your opinion, how many PR3-4 links is a single PR7 link worth?
In your opinion, how many PR3-4 links is a single PR7 link worth?
That depends on the total count of links on the PR7 page :)
It it's the only one, I'd say hundreds :)
>The total for these links is 5530 links
This is irrelevant - you can't compare the total of backlins to different sites with backlinks to a single other site.
OTOH if your sub domains (canonicals) are well linked from outside and have a decent pr, linking them back to the main site (www.example.com) can help boosting the main site. This is no magic but the standard pr transfer like if you would link from www.anotherexample.com to www.example.com.
You should continue to hunt for more backlinks to each subdomain and use them to target their "subdomain topic" - like "Example News at news.example.com" etc. ...
Then keep the "mother site" www.example.com more general and target the "mother keywords" - the word Japan in your case. Link to this main site from the subdomains using the main keyword(s) Japan.
However, you should be carefull with your linking strategy between the subdomains and the main site. It could be worth to read at the forum Link Development [webmasterworld.com] - especially the discussions about canonicals [google.com] (subdomains) are interesting. And watch out for the posts of the former moderator paynt cause she's the canonical guru here at WebmasterWorld and posted a lot of good tips and ideas about subdomain linking.
btw: being # 32 for a 53,000,000 search is pretty good!
<added>
I see, you have a lot of content rich subdomains that are not yet listed at the dmoz. Since these are physically different sites, you could submit them to addditional categories at the dmoz ... i never had a problem to get subdomains listed. This increases pr / popularity of your subdomains which further increases the pr / popularity of your mother site (if interlinked).
</added>
Is the hypertext in the incoming links to your subdomain from pages within your own site?
general question - general answer: yes.
