Ok, for ages now Google has treated subdomains off of a main domain as separate domains in their own right. This is what allowed several loopholes into the ranking system. Last year one person exploited it to the point of ranking for tens of thousands of terms in a matter of months (see here). It allowed for the fact that links pointing back to the main domain counted as their own entity, instead of what would otherwise be considered a "sitewide" link. Today, something has changed that might impact that. Now when you do a site:www.domain.com search on domains that have thousands of subdomains, all of them show up, not just the ones on the main domain. This could be Google's answer to the subdomain exploit. Or, of course, it could just be another bug they didn't mean to introduce. More here. Any thoughts? -Michael
Well, I wouldn't change anything or give up hope quite yet. This just happened today, we need to see exactly how it affected serps and whatnot. Does anyone know of any searches, for instance, that about.com usually has high rankings for? Something we can use as a benchmark? -Michael
Well, actually I've noticed that in the end of the summer. I have a domain with three subdomains on it and every time I check indexed pages, all three subdomains with their sub-pages were included in results.
No, this is new, I'm not the only one to notice it. It has always been that if you type site:domain.com all of the subdomains show as well, is this what you are thinking of? -Michael
Yeah - it's been as such for quite a while now - methinks the spammers were having too much fun with SD spam
I use subdomains to segment my site. It makes it easier to track visitors and see which sections are doing well and which should just be lopped off.
I dont know what the article is about, site:www.domain.com only shows www.domain.com for me. However, if you do site:domain.com all subdomains come up. Pierce
I wonder if this depends how your .htaccess handles domain.com and subdomain www.domain.com? I am picking up subdomains with both site:domain.com and site:www.domain.com.
site:www.blogspot.com returns: Your search - site:www.blogspot.com - did not match any documents. Pierce
After all we are having hundreds of links from forums.digitalpoint.com which happens to be a sub domain! forums.digitalpoint.com -subdomain That means we could hjave fun with creating thousands for sub domains in free hosting and we could point links from there to our websites
I just did a search for site:www.blogspot.com on the Datacenter Watch Tool and different datacenters are returning different results. Example: 216.239.51.107 = Your search - site:www.blogspot.com - did not match any documents. while others are reporting... 216.239.53.107 = Results 1 - 10 of about 13,300,000 from www.blogspot.com. (0.02 seconds) and 216.239.37.107 = Results 1 - 10 of about 12,600,000 from www.blogspot.com. (0.10 seconds) I have noticed that the site: search is returning some funky results across the datacenters lately! Caryl PS - My own site has eleven subdomains and a search for site:www.mcdar.net across the datacenters is showing the same distorted results for it as the results for blogspot above.
It's too early to affirm or refute something, as the update is still in action. Things are changing daily and many theories crash before they born. Let's wait for a while before diving in controversy.
See Results 1 - 10 of about 12,600,000 from www.blogspot.com. Results 1 - 10 of about 35,000,000 from blogspot.com.
I think the answer is some where in the middle, Google still consider sub-domains as separate entity, but the value of the link back to same website is decreased, while its considered a full domain link for outside websites.