Daily Domain Name Registration Blog

Hmm. Apparently, Google have changed the way that subdomains are handled in their search results.I take it that Google have (finally) got wise to the way that some people abuse the subdomain system by adding subdomains where they don’t really belong in order to make it look like one website is many websites. According to various sources, Google have switched from treating subdomains as basically separate websites to grouping them in the same way that they group directories.

Suppose you search for “ostrich jam”; your results page might look something like this:

domain.com/ostrich/jam

domain.com/ostrich_jam/chutney [View similar pages]

otherdomain.com/ostrichjam

Directories of the same domain name are grouped together - the most relevant is shown, the next most relevant is shown indented, and then the user has the option of viewing more pages from the same source. The problem, of course, is that you might have two very different sections of the same website which have different, relevant information on them. People have got round this problem by using subdomains (e.g. ostrichjam.domain.com) to divide up their website into its separate sections, because search engines have treated these as if they are essentially separate websites.

Of course, it’s so easy to make subdomains that the system has been open to abuse, and some people just don’t know what they’re doing and create subdomains where directories would make a lot more sense. It seems that Google’s wised up to this and altered its algorithms to treat subdomains differently.

The main concern for webmasters will be that some subdomains may be treated unfairly under the new system. Many community sites - especially the free ones - give new users a subdomain under the main website name. For example, LiveJournal users have an URL in the form username.livejournal.com. Each of these subdomains is run by a different webmaster; the only thing that links the thousands of subdomains under livejournal.com is that they are all hosted by LiveJournal, but their content is completely independent. It would be quite dreadful if results from LiveJournal blogs were all grouped under the same section on Google’s results pages.

I think it’s likely that Google will have used some common sense and planned ahead for this. (It wouldn’t want its own blogging service Blogger.com to suffer, for a start.) Webmasters probably shouldn’t worry until they see problems actually occurring, but it is something worth keeping an eye on, nevertheless.