Does Subdomain Affects SEO
Ranking with a subdomain is really easy. But do these Subdomains Affects Overall SEO of website. This is the question which I asked on Google webmaster forum, but still there is no one to answer. I searched on Google with this title but instead of clarification I am completely confused. Some says, putting content on subdomains which is different from primary niche will seriously affect your domain.
Some says its the best method of getting ranked in any particulate keywords, and you will come into notice of Panda. Since panda penalties are for complete site URL, so your primary blog or website will be affected.
After all this I just searched on Google with word subdomain, and I found Matt Cutts blog where he did the discussion on subdomains and directories.
Matt Cutts Explanation
According to him Google consider every directory and subdomain as unique URL and it is not connected to primary domain in any case. But then he also told, they are connected just because of their same DNS, so to some extent it will affect primary domain ( my thought ).
Here’s a example : maps.google.com, docs.google.com, news.google.com, play.google.com etc
All these domains are partition of Google Inc primary domain, Google.com. And all of these subdomains are based on completely different niche. One is to provide maps, other for apps etc. But I don’t think any of them is affecting the primary domain in any terms of SEO. I think this is what Matt Cutts wanted to express.
The Test On SubDomains : Are They Affecting SEO
Leave about search engines, according to me they have power to add their own subdomains and directories as exclusion. So lets go into live websites and check if they are performing well will subdomains or not : Our test is on TopTenReviews and Cnet
I think I don’t need to give any introductions to these two websites. They are world famous for their reviews, services, comparisons and tech news. They do all types of research in field of technology. If we just perform a search on google with the sentence top ten hosting services we will get web-hosting-review.toptenreviews.com as the very first or second result. And if we perform any search with word download, the very first website which is going to come is download.cnet.com
Now we see that both of these top ranking sites are subdomains. And they actually bring the most of the traffic to the main website. So the question here arises is : Does Subdomain Affects Overall SEO, Are the primary domain affected by Panda or Penguin. Or is subdomain having any wrong impact on the primary domain in terms of other SEO tactics.. I think every one is going to support me and the answer is no. See the results below :
But i think this is the result of download.com and not download.cnet.com. But according to alexa 99.90% visitors comes to download.cnet.com and not to download.com.
VISITOR TREND
The very similar result you will get for toptenreviews.com. After considering to them I can make sure that subdomains really doesn’t affect SEO on an overall.
And for toptenreviews, I used opensite explorer to check how many links are provided to it. You will be amazed to know that for opensite explorer web-hosting-review.toptenreviews.com is main domain and it has total of 120 linkbacks.
OPENSITE EXPLORER RESULTS
With so good page and domain authority i don’t think that subdomains will every have any negative impact on primary domain. In the next article I will be discussing on how to rank easily for any keyword with subdomains.
About Vivek Kumar Poddar
I searched Google regrding that same question and got nowhere myself! It seems as sub-directories are a completely different animal and indexed as a direct part of the main site. Using WordPress as my platform that is not an option I have at this point, so I created a subdomain for my blog.
Hi Vivek,
I agree with you, that sub domains helps to achieve ranks for keywords very easily. I notice that sub domains contains links will be treated as back links to the parent domain [i verified this on SEOProfiler .com].
Best Regards
I got a question! Forget about SEO for a moment, what about Google Adsense !
if I am having a domain eBrahmins.co.in and subdomain blog.eBrahmins.co.in and I requested for Adsense and provided eBrahmins.co.in as URL. so my blog.eBrahmins.co.in will be considered as a part of that ?
because I got “rejection as Content is not sufficient! ” eBrahmins.co.in having only 3 pages. but blog.eBrahmins.co.in is big and having lot of pages, around 60 Pages !!
So , is it means Google havent consider my blog.eBrahmins.co.in directory as its a sub-domain ?
Whether you are banned or not verified by domain.com or blog.domain.com. It really doesn’t matters. Since subdomain is a extension, so you can’t get verified in that case. You can use hubpages or something similar to get verified adsense accounts.
Good Info , but i have little Doubt , if the sub domain has backlinks from many spam links and untrusted forums. Will the backlinks of the sub-domain affect the main domain from seo point of view?
Not, most probably it won’t affect your domain’s SEO.