Does Google penalize your site for using sub domains with same design?

Hi,

Does anybody know if google will penalize or put your site into supplemental resutls even the direct homepage subdomain if you use sub domains that have the exact same design but with different content. Some of the pages from each sub domain may have about 50 - 75% the same content if there is not much content on some of the pages.

What do you think. The reasons why I ask this is because my site is like this and most pages even the main domain homepage is in supplemental. It is not breaking any webmaster guidelines apart from the possible duplicate content factor on the sub domains plus the same design.

I also have alot of backlinks and the site use to be ranked very high with many keywords before it lost all rankings during Decemeber.

This is not a site review, it is just asking if a site could get penalised or put in supplemental just because of using sub domains. The sub domains is like videos.domain and games.domain. The content is different but some pages that list the game or video may have very small content and alot of the design plus the navigation will be the same and things making both pages on the both sub domains similar.

The thing is sub domains are used for the same site, they are not treated as different sites for me, but google may treat them as differernt domains and sites and think most of the site has duplicate content.

I don't really want to make the site on one domain and not use sub domains as sub domains is used so my visitors can type the sub domain to directly go to the location of the site and also remember the url more easily.

 

no i dont think they would ... because alot of forums and blogs are subdomains and if they use a same design they can't be counted as duplicate content.

 

Maybe its your site structure.

Google has been known to penalise domains including sub-domains but usually this is a ban and doesnt seem to be your case.

 

But with blogs they have alot of content per page so that will never have 50 - 60% duplicate content on each sub domain.

With forums the design may be the same for the head and footer as their homepage of their main domain, but then the forums script and actual content is totally different.

I mean everything is totally different on all my sub domains, which include the header, footer, large navigation menus, etc and then I have the content which is different. But then on some pages there may only be a few lines of content which will give the overall page a 70% or so duplicate content as another page on another sub domain that has little content.

I'm asking this because I have a site that has 1,000's of backlinks where some of them have good PR and it has been online for 5 years and is my only site that has sub domains and it has mostly all gone in the supplemental results even the main domain itself is now supplemental. It breaks no webmaster guidelines and definately know that, apart from the sub domains and duplicate content facters with the same design on each sub domain.

With Yahoo, yes they have sub domains, but they also have each design on each subdomain different. I though that was a little strange to have the design of each sub domain quite a bit different, but now I am starting to think this is way.

 

But maybe it is going into supplemental and then it will also go from there. I am rather worried about this. I don't know if it is worth putting it all on the main domain and not having sub domains, but then this site is 5 years old and I have alot of links to these sub domains and alot of visitors that have always known these sub domains and wouldn't want to mess around just so that I still don't get my site out of supplemental results and end up loosing all of my traffic over it.

Plus, who would want to link to a site if their linking stucture keeps on changing and the links on their sites keep becoming dead or 301's.

 

no they wont except you put your site in google database twice by using your subdomain. that case they will have penaltize i think. many site suggest that do not submit your subdomain intothe same search engine because SE did not know that it's a different content it will jsut think it's SPAM submit.

 

I'm of the same opinion. My site does has sub-domains with the same design. Popular sites and the forums...like DPF also has the same thing.

 

No way, half of WP or other cms's would be banned.

 

Google check content not design imo..
Saad

 

if you use same content on a subdomain , it will a reason to ban . i think G will not care the theme or design

 

I had a site with almost exatactly this same content on main domain and on subdomaind (with different design). This could be at least duplicate content, but Google had no problem with that and I never got any punishment.

 

I think your ok you should have no problems just make sure your using different rich keyword topics for both sites.. Try not to use the same text with both sites....

 

I agree with you. In spite of my experience (this was only a test) I don't recommend to do this to anyone. It is risky.

 

I do not submit sites. I let the search engines find it thorugh backlinks.

 

This is false information as far as what I can see with DPF. Yes, digitalpoint forums uses a sub domain, but then where's the other sub domain with another Digitalpoint forums. There isn't one.

These forums is on one sub domain with all of its content.

I have same design with similar content on like cad.domain.com and cad2.domain.com

Digitalpoint fourms is only on forums.digitalpoint.com

Tell me if I am correct or wrong.


I also just looked at your site and you are correct when you say you use sub domains with exactly the same design, but you have much more unique content that well outweighs the amount of the same content on each sub domain.

Mine is different. Also I know that Google may look at the content rather than the design, but as I said. I have large navigation menus and that is content as it has words in them. Some of them menus probably have more words in than some of the actual unique content on each sub domain.

I am looking well into this and think it looks like I may have to change it. It was a little strange that all of my site had different designs for each sub domain which made it not that professional. I asked in other forums would it be best to have all of the same design so that it looks like one site and I had alot of yes's, so I did it. About 1 - 2 months later the site gets a penality and most of it went into supplemental. I have just launched 2 more sub domains about 1 month ago and now I have seen much more go into Supplemental, infact nearly all of the site is there now even the actual sub domains and the top level domain is in supplemental results.

 

Not unless you have the same content in the both the domain and subdomain.

 

I don't have the same content in the domain and subdomain. I have similar content in 2 different sub domains.

I have been doing marketing and seo for 5 years. I know alot, I know the site has followed all TOS. I have never done doorway pages, landing pages, hidden text, etc.

I know there is nothing wrong with the site, which makes me think that it must be just because google is taking each sub domain as a totally different domain and also the content on it, making it look as if I am using large amount of duplicate content on multiple domain names.

That's the only conclusion that I have come to. After today the site has fallen further in the index. I type domain.com in the index and it comes about 45, that's the first page in the index and it's not even the main domain or any of the homepages of the sub domains.

This site has over well over 5,000 back links where alot of them were automaticall done by other people wanting to link to the site.

 

I'm thinking of putting all sub domain content on the main domain. Do you think this would be the best thing to do so that I can have just one large site on one single domain name. The site has over 250,000 pages.

Also, I will have to do 301 redirects so that all links will redirect to the new location for each of the pages.

Do you think that doing this will mean that all of my 5 years of advertising the site would have been a near waste of time when it comes to getting backlinks if I move the site over and also 301 redirect the links. If people see that it is a 301 now, do you think they would just delete that link from their site or keep it or maybe link it to the new location?

 

I've now decided to just leave the site on sub domains. If I move the sub domains content on the main domain then I will loose typein traffic most probably, plus it will only start looking like my site is rubb*sh in that everyone links to it and then I change all of the links and eventually I will probably loose ranking and 5 years of work down the pan.

I know that when I go to a site I prefer to type in games.domain.com rather than go to the homepage and then click on the games link or type in domain.com/games.html or something.

 

my site got banned for using subdomains - i removed them all and got unbanned

- subdomains only work if your are only using the images and structure templates - if your subdomains have any of the same "text" in the templates your asking for trouble