Unethical Promotion Via Subdomain

As we all knows that if a website is listed in dmoz / yahoo and possess a good amount of backlinks can rank very well in google. Now in order to take advantage of the domain people use subdomians. Since last few years peoples are using sub-domains in a very unethical manner or may be i am wrong if i think so. What i mosty observe is that in order to take advantage of a domain people use all wrong tactics and strangely get away with same.

To cite an example there is a website on hosting. It got a PR of 7. Listed in yahoo / dmoz. Now the company to whom this website belong to has nothing to do with travel. And what they did, they took a subdomain on travel and are ranking very well on travel keywords. This was just an example, i can site as many as 10 - 15 examples of same. Mostly people buys an expired domain listed in yahoo / dmoz, regardless of the fact that whether the domain belong to their field or not and make a subdomain on it and promote it.

I may be wrong by calling it unethical, needs your feedback. And if there is nothing wrong with same than may be i should adopt that policy as well. I never seen google penalising any such site.

 

We too do the same, we have good sites on travel and other stuff. Subdomains made on such have prooved very successful.

Whats unethical in that ??

 

not so much unethical as spammy. if google finds a site doing this they might just give you a penalty.

 

As far as I know, a subdomain is considered as a different site from the main site, if it is not interlinked. So if I continue to do whitehat SEO on the subdomain, and still make use of the above said advantage, whats spammy in that ??

 

Nothing

 

If you have a website on travel and making a travel subdomain on it, nothing wrong. If you have a domain called india.com and makes a subdomains on it like handicrafts.india.com, apparel.india.com, bollywood.india.com - nothing wrong in it. But what about if you owns a domain called hosting.com and make a subdomain on it named travel.hosting.com? Isnt it unethical?

 

Does that make every blogger using blogspot unethical? What about anyone with a geocities page?

etc,etc

Ethics have nothing to do with the fact it is a subdomain. Spam is Spam wheter they paid $6 for a unique domain or used a new subdomain.

 

Blogspot and geocities are bigger concepts than what i was talking about.

So conclusion is that even if i have a website called sports.com(online news portal on sports), i can make any subdomain on it like - link-popularity.sports.com(for marketing link popularity services of someone) and it is not unethical. Am i right?

 

Of course not.

 

well i would like to have other guys getting into this talk as well. I admires you yfs1, but donnt you think logically it is unethical and you are fooling search engines to gain rankings - as in the above cited example sports has nothing to do with seo.

 

First of all, who says a subdomain needs to be related to the domain? You are making a distinction between domains and subdomains when in reality they are treated as two different sites in every way.

To be honest you may need to define what "ethics" means to you because I still can't see what could possibly be unethical about it.

 

Last question. why does a subdomain gets the advantage of link building on main domain, if they are treated as 2 different sites?

Anyways thanks for clearing the issue.

 

Where did you get that from...If all links were lumped into one then you could create a geocities site and instantly rank for anything you want.

When was the last time you saw a geocities site rank first for anything competitive?

 

Isn't that kind of like the issue that got wordpress (or whatever cms company it was) in hot water for setting up spammy subdomains for which they ended up ranking very highly until they were removed, entirely, from google?

 

i cannt post urls of subdomains here which ranks very high with competitive keywords. They neither have any explosive linkage nor listed in yahoo/dmoz, but still getting rankings as the main domain got listings in yahoo / dmoz...i can send them via PM if you feel interested in getting into topic. I already told from the beginning, i may be wrong and wanna clear the issue.

 

why did they got removed if subdomain is treated as seperate site than whats wrong with that?

were they removed?

 

wordpress got tanked because they put up a load of MFA articles with hidden links and used their trusted domain status to rank for a load of different hig ppaying keywords like Loans and Casinos.

There was a couple of rogue hosting companies that put some spammy subdomains on some of their customers domains causing the sites to get banned in google.

theres nothing to stop you putting up hundreds of subdomains off a central domain but if it looks like your trying to game the search engines then sooner or later your gonna get penalized.

 

ANYTHING you can do to improve your earnings without breaking a REAL law is fine. Terms like Whitehat Blackhat and Spam should be ignored. The bottom line is that you should be in business to make money.

The only rule you need to follow is a simple one: If you feel comfortable doing something to improve rankings/visits/earnings then do it. If you are NOT comfortable using a certain technique, DON'T!

It shouldn't matter what other webmasters are doing... if you are not comfortable with it, don't do it.

Personally I would have no problems leveraging a subdomain for better rankings, or even things like cloaking if it made a real difference... but on the other hand, I avoid exploiting the "adult" markets. I don't think there is anything wrong with it, people make millions from adult content, but I don't feel comfortable with it and so I avoid it.

Spend more time doing YOUR thing, less time worrying about what the other guy is doing (unless you are willing to COPY him) and you'll get farther ahead than if you waste time thinking about what you WOULDN'T do.

my2c.

 

A subdomain does not get credit from DMOZ or any other link to the "mother" site. A subdomain might as well be an entirely different domain name, the only advantage to using one is the potential to avoid any Google sandbox or age penalty.

 

I don't see anything wrong with a travel.whatever.com subdomain page...especially if the subdomain has relevant content. Seems fine.