I feel we’ve been hit hard as my new site with all new content went up after this change. I barely get leads as I did with my older site. I am also being charged $500 a month for Google Ad Words which is beginning to raise a few serious questions as well – I doubt that being charged equally every month for the same number of clicks is real or factual any longer especially with the lack of leads. I am having our site analytics looked at as well as the new content. I’ve also read that using all of these other domains as a “back door” into your site may not work either… there is too much convoluted information out there — it is difficult to “trust” any company or anything you read when you have the statistics in your hands!

Hi Chris,

This article gave a lot of insights not only of the value of subdomains but more importantly the list of questions that one should consider when creating content. Often sites are built around keywords with rehashed and recycled content to game the search engines. With the Panda update, people are going to give spammy content a second look before publishing it on their website.

Gerry

A lot of the ‘geek’ people don’t realize, that most users DO NOT look or care about the domain name. so if it’s subdomain1.mydomain.com or subdmoain2.mydomain.com or http://www.mydomain.com, users don’t see it.
All they see is the page they landed on and the branding on it.
We’ve setup one of our customers with an automated script that dynamically creates sub-domains based on keywords. From having SE ranking in positions 150 and above for only 33% of their 400+ keywords, after implementation they have 98% of their keywords ranked and most have caused other pages on the site (under the www sub-domain) to increase ranking. the average ranking is now in the first 20 for majority of the keywords, with more than 50% in the first page.

Bing/Yahoo/and the rest still haven’t picked up the sub-domains.

so yes – sub-domains do work, if implemented correctly.

I think too many people are concerned with the quality of content alone, while this is very important, they forget that Google wants the whole site to be quality…that means paying attention to the little things like keeping your server clean, having a proper structure, naming pages and files properly and doing all the other basic SEO things.

None of my clients have been “hit” by Panda…and it’s funny, when I’ve tried to help friends, it’s like they don’t want to hear that there site is Fu@(ed up and they just want a quick fix or they’re hoping someone will outline an easy fix for them on sites like this!!

There’s no quick fix…just don’t be lazy, clean up your site and you should be fine!

I think if Google wants to be the police man of content they need to be a lot better at giving people thier day in court. I also think they need to be way more responsive to complaints. As it is they can shut anyone down and there is no customer service, court of appeal or any way to find out from the company what the offending website did wrong.

Just two days ago, I listened to an internet guru claim that his sites which were set-up using subdomains were doing well and were not swiped by the Panda bear.

I’ll definitely give this a try because I was hit by Panda 2.0

Nice article, Chris.

I read that list a little while back. Some very helpful points to consider(And of course, apply).
I read a post recently that stated there have been hundreds of updates in recent times, as far as Google’s ways of determining it’s page search ranking are concerned( Algorithm changes).

I am not to sure how dividing content into sub – domains would go.

I will say I think it is possible that many larger sites(thousands of pages) may be weighed down in the rankings, due to many of their older articles(No longer relevant/ or current/ pages need a good polish) draining the sites overall performance.
The Search ranking issue can become quite frustrating when you see so many contradictions, which, go totally against many of the “Must Do’s” for getting good search results.

There is not a day that passes where I almost fall off my chair, upon seeing some sites with almost zero content(very poor or at best average quality) are pulling in high PR, are near the top(Strata) of site ranking(Not just Google search ranking / actual sites ranking per the site) and on occasion, have a huge price tag(Site value) attached.

When I mention this on some Authority(More established) sites(In a comment) there seems to be an attitude of ” Oh, yeah that’s terrible”! Yet, I have a gut feeling(Which is incredibly accurate) that many(so called) Authority sites, may also be using similar methods, in one way or another.

It’s like ” Yeah, we know. Just don’t go there”!

Aside from this, I will hazard a guess and say Google puts the highest level of importance on Quality, Relevance(content per site/niche) and the absence of duplicate content.

Daniel.

I’m thinking Google wants to consider site-level indicators as well as page-level ones and splitting things up sure makes that easier. With things like Wonder Wheel and site shortcuts, being able to tell what a site is about is important.

Actually, true to its human imitation form, this is what I would like to see as a person when I search – the SITES that fit my query, not just pages in web directories or article sites that don’t specialize.

Even using the author as a search indicator makes sense to me.

Funny how we sometimes miss innocuous statements (like the one about Google’s regard of subdomains from 2007) until they come back to bite us.

Panda has done nothing but boost our websites…all 65 of them offer unique content, correct spelling and punctuation. I would assume allot of websites from non English speaking countries will surely see their sites rank diminish with the new Panda protocols. I believe Panda is a good thing due to the fact that i have spent many years of hard work studying English and others who have not? They will surely perish until they “wake up and smell the Panda” and learn to write and spell properly. This is the solution for recovery in my opinion. Great article Chris!

Interesting article. Trying to separate the poor quality content from the good quality content by creating a subdomain on a primary domain, in my opinion would still hurt the site. It is essentially still contents from the same site. Do I make any sense?