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GP said: "Google treats subdomains as essentially entirely different domains." This is false. If a domain has a small number of subdomains then their authority

by iaskwhy 14y ago

GP said: "Google treats subdomains as essentially entirely different domains." This is false. If a domain has a small number of subdomains then their authority is shared thus making it false that priceonomics.com would benefit from using a folder instead of a subdomain for their blog, their only subdomain. Fell free to recommend me a book that says and proves otherwise. You could argue it would make sense to keep their blog as a folder like they do for /jobs and /about for coherency. I would agree.

thenomad 14y ago
I can't provide a cite for this right now, but I'm reasonably sure I've seen SEOMoz staff suggesting that it's a bad idea to keep your blog on a subdomain, for exactly the reasons Patio11 suggests. (Also, whilst he's being modest here, Patio11 is something of an authority on SEO himself.) Edit - yep, here: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/domain http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/domain
- ssharp 14y ago
  Here is a Matt Cutts article saying that it doesn't really matter: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/ http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/
  - ckluis 14y ago
    So I moved my blog.mintek.com to mintek.com/blog after using HubSpot and switching to a custom wordpress install. I can't tell you that all the advantage was from the url restructuring, but it had a marked impact. Having tried similar things on test sites, I do think it makes a difference. And that is what SEO is about… testing assumptions because there is no definitive answer. Even Matt Cutts isn't going to tell you everything 100%.
  - Estragon 14y ago
    Matt Cutts seems like a good guy, but there is an unavoidable conflict of interest when he gives advice like this. Google's job would be much easier if everyone believed the only way to rank is to have popular, useful content. Also, that article is five years old.
patio11 14y ago
You're sort of moving the target here. I care very little about scoring Internet points, but I care very much about HNers not making decisions which will damage their business, so let's reiterate: it is categorically not the case that Google does not have a notion of domains. Page A and Page B, given that they are on the same domain, can easily influence each other's rankings even without a link passed between A and B, by separately garnering trust for the domain. This informs several SEO strategies which will work such as e.g. publishing OSS on your domain to get link juice and other indicia of trust which you then use to rank things that real people (and your bottom line) actually care about. As to whether blog.example.com and www.example.com share trust metrics, sentiment among SEOs are mixed. Consensus estimate among SEOs who I'd trust with my business would be close to "blog.example.com and www.example.com are treated as at half-arms lengths for the purposes of accumulating link juice and virtually identically for the purpose of awarding link juice." This suggests that you want as few subdomains as reasonably possible for publicly visible content which will either attract links or which you want to rank. For similar reasons, I'd suggest most startups would require a darn good reason to have more than one toplevel domain. Google has said not to worry about this issue, but that a very common answer from Google when probed about any specifics of their algorithms. Google will also say things like "Quality content is 99% of SEO" which if it is true is true in the sense that Santa Claus is true -- perhaps a good message to tell children but I would not base my ability to feed my employees' family on the likelihood of finding a jolly fat guy if I went to the North Pole to check.

by iaskwhy 14y ago

thenomad 14y ago

I can't provide a cite for this right now, but I'm reasonably sure I've seen SEOMoz staff suggesting that it's a bad idea to keep your blog on a subdomain, for exactly the reasons Patio11 suggests. (Also, whilst he's being modest here, Patio11 is something of an authority on SEO himself.) Edit - yep, here: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/domain http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/domain

ssharp 14y ago
Here is a Matt Cutts article saying that it doesn't really matter: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/ http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/
- ckluis 14y ago
  So I moved my blog.mintek.com to mintek.com/blog after using HubSpot and switching to a custom wordpress install. I can't tell you that all the advantage was from the url restructuring, but it had a marked impact. Having tried similar things on test sites, I do think it makes a difference. And that is what SEO is about… testing assumptions because there is no definitive answer. Even Matt Cutts isn't going to tell you everything 100%.
- Estragon 14y ago
  Matt Cutts seems like a good guy, but there is an unavoidable conflict of interest when he gives advice like this. Google's job would be much easier if everyone believed the only way to rank is to have popular, useful content. Also, that article is five years old.

patio11 14y ago

You're sort of moving the target here. I care very little about scoring Internet points, but I care very much about HNers not making decisions which will damage their business, so let's reiterate: it is categorically not the case that Google does not have a notion of domains. Page A and Page B, given that they are on the same domain, can easily influence each other's rankings even without a link passed between A and B, by separately garnering trust for the domain. This informs several SEO strategies which will work such as e.g. publishing OSS on your domain to get link juice and other indicia of trust which you then use to rank things that real people (and your bottom line) actually care about. As to whether blog.example.com and www.example.com share trust metrics, sentiment among SEOs are mixed. Consensus estimate among SEOs who I'd trust with my business would be close to "blog.example.com and www.example.com are treated as at half-arms lengths for the purposes of accumulating link juice and virtually identically for the purpose of awarding link juice." This suggests that you want as few subdomains as reasonably possible for publicly visible content which will either attract links or which you want to rank. For similar reasons, I'd suggest most startups would require a darn good reason to have more than one toplevel domain. Google has said not to worry about this issue, but that a very common answer from Google when probed about any specifics of their algorithms. Google will also say things like "Quality content is 99% of SEO" which if it is true is true in the sense that Santa Claus is true -- perhaps a good message to tell children but I would not base my ability to feed my employees' family on the likelihood of finding a jolly fat guy if I went to the North Pole to check.