Subdomains considered internal links or not?

Hey all,

I was thinking... And I came up with this question: If I link to blue.ohwidgets.com from www.ohwidgets.com would it be treated as an internal or external link?

I'm trying to figure out whether I should add new content in subdomains or in directories to www.ohwidgets.com

Thank you in advance.

 

external - unless they've changed it recently. there was a blackhat technique not too long ago where you generate 1000's of subdomains and point them all back to your target and you could float a 'fake' PR10

 

subdomains in my opinion should be considered inlinks since they are pointing to another part of your site... but im not sure what it is exactly

 

Actually it makes sense if they consider it external.

When I think about all those subdomains like whoa.blogspot.com

I wonder what would happen if all those blogspot subdomains linking to each were considered internal links.

Still, I wonder if anyone has solid experience on this.

p.s. : When I came up with this question, I thought it was a really exciting one. But looking at just 2 replies (thank you noobatlife and kg_lew) I'm confused. Should I just ignore the topic or is it such an old and well-known issue that nobody bothers to answer?

 

IMO,
They are considered external. I've been in seo since 1999, I have worked with tens of thousands of subdomains, and it has been my experience that they are considered external.

Furthermore, whether that is fact or not, IMO, I do not recommend subdomains. I would recommend that you build the folders as you mentioned. There are exceptions to the rule, of course.

But a site with folders is considered one site, and you want to make every effort possible to build a monolithic giant with high traffic ratings on a per site level. I am of the opinion that sites with more traffic seem to outperform sites broken up into subdomains.

Now, you may have some legitimate reasons for subdomains. Perhaps you get so much traffic and you dont work with clusters of servers or load balancing.......an easy way to segment that traffic, by computer and network, is to use subdomains.

but i doubt that is going to become an issue for you. but possible. especially for gaming and video sites. It is easy to saturate a 100Mbit switch with video, so doesnt matter how fast your computer is if you network cant keep up.

In the most ideal situation, a gigabit switch can only sustain 125megabytes download, collisions asside. You got 10 people downloading 10 swf files of 12.5mb or 10minutes long in the same second, and that switch is done for that second. You got 50 people downloading the beforementioned, and that switch is definitely done. And most webmasters dont get a guaranteed 1000Mbit connection, but get 10Mbit with 100Mbit burstable (read they will shut the traffic down, ie throttle it)

In this case, it may be more prudent to segment your traffic by subdomains, as load balancing webservers is still behind the same router, etc.

sorry so verbose.......

but if you are building a traditional business, mom and pop type business, i think it is in your best interest to build the traffic to one subdomain, that being your WWW subdomain, so to speak, as technically that is a subdomain, and dont segment like you inquired about.

just my opinion.

 

google treats it as a completely different site

 

Subdomains are external for sure.

 

Not sure, but I think Google now treat these links as internal links.

Anyway, I am not sure about this.

 

Google were considering changing the way they treat sub-domains. You see the problem is we have two issues with Sub-Domains..If we look at:

weather.cnn.com

and

carl.blogspot.com

These are both SUB Domains, but the first is a section of cnn.com, while the other is a completly different site in which somebody has put there hard work into.

It would be very unfair to treat Sub-Domains as internal pages, as many hosting providers provide there users with sites in the form of a sub domain. Just look at .110mb.com .wordpress.com even .co.cc is a sub-domain. All of these users would then be at a disadvantage.

In my opinion it should be up to the big guns to use directories in the form of
cnn.com/weather
and NOT weather.cnn.com

They should be punished by Google. Sub Domain = New Domain and new website imo. Google would be very wrong and misuing there power if they did otherwise.

 

Hmm. Based on seeing what's happening with subdomains with sites like wordpress, 110mb... is they're getting extremely fast indexing and high position ranking in search engines for their keywords.

Eg I know many .110mb.com subdomains that rank 1st in Google for keyword phrases that other established sites have been ranking for 10x longer.

This is only based on speculation, but it seems (at least Google) treats subdomains associated with high PR sites, with extra importance.

 

first, one should realize the facts.
www dot yourdomain dot com is a subdomain. the fact is, that if there is a host name (anything before the name of the registered domain), it is a subdomain.

to be more correct, one should discuss domains in the sense of tiers. so, a top level domain (tld) is .com or .org or .net etc. A second level domain is mydomain.com or yourdomain.net etc. And a third level domain (frequently referred to as subdomains) is weather.cnn.com or www dot cnn dot com, etc (sorry, i cant post links yet).

putting all the semantics aside (I am network+ and i-net+ certified, so correct terminology is a peeve i suppose)....

in my very strong opinion, i am 99percent sure that subdomains are treated as separate domains.

I also recognize the fact that domains with PR8 who have subdomains, generally find those subdomains with high PR and good listings.

but i dont think that is because of JUST the root domain having it.

these 'subdomains' stand alone, having thousands of quality inbounding links, frequently with a high ratio of 'deep links' into the interior pages of the subdomain. frequently they have their own dmoz and yahoo directory listings, etc etc.

If I have a PR8 root domain, and i open a subdomain and put some pages on it, and it gets NO links, it is unlikely to become a PR6 site 'just because' of the pr8 root domain.

so while it is true that the subdomains of root domains with PR8 do well, I dont think it is 'just because' their parent root domain has a pr8 or whatever.

just my opinion, and astounding may be correct.

my two cents.

 

Thanks all for the opinions.

My major concern was about the server load issues as whoisbambam mentioned.

After reading all these, I see that it's still a "gray" field for SEO.