Cutts Clarifies Subdomain Changes

On Friday, news came out from PubCon that Google was changing the way it treated subdomains in the search results, limiting them to 2 URLs per domain. Google’s Matt Cutts, who was credited with breaking the news, was surprised to hear it, too.

The rumor went this way:

Matt Cutts informed us that Google will very soon begin treating subdomains and subdirectories the same in this fashion: there will be only 2 total urls from a domain in any set of search results, so no more getting 3, 4 or however many spots via subdomains.

Cutts posted on his blog this morning though, that that was only partially true. Google had received complaints about rarer, long-tail searches returning several results from one domain. So Google changed its algorithms to make that less likely.

Matt writes, "This change doesn’t apply across the board; if a particular domain is really relevant, we may still return several results from that domain. For example, with a search query like [ibm] the user probably likes/wants to see several results from ibm.com. Note that this is a pretty subtle change, and it doesn’t affect a majority of our queries. In fact, this change has been live for a couple weeks or so now and no one noticed."