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."

poker.mobi – $150,000
ringtones.mobi – $145,000
news.mobi – $110,000
shopping.mobi – $55,000
email.mobi – $50,000
buy.mobi – $32,500
podcast.mobi – $25,000
cash.mobi – $12,500
pda.mobi – $8,000
zipcodes.mobi – $8,000

As the governing body of .Mobi domains all of the money made will be re-invested into dotMobi’s further product launches and promotions of this popular domain extension.

This is yet another indication that the .Mobi mobile website domain extension is here to stay and has a great many powerful supporters. If you haven’t picked one up for your own brand then I highly recommend doing so quickly. The news is getting out! And no, I am in no way profiting from this recommendation… I just love the concept and I am 100% behind it.

Read up on mobile news, and mobile website creation and optimization:

• Mobile Website Creation and Optimization – Part 1, Part 2
• Your First Mobile Website, Should it be a .mobi or a Mobile Subdomain?
• A Peek at the Future of Mobile at Google.com

Comments

Their challenge contends the Ideaflood patent came into being well after Apache web server developers had been discussing subdomain creation more than a year before Ideaflood filed its patent claim.

“This illustrates how an open-source project can establish a public record of technology development and thwart invalid patents,” said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Jason Schultz.

“The public discussions on the Apache and other mailing lists have shown that Ideaflood’s patent claims were without merit and that the patent should be revoked before it causes any more damage to innovation on the Internet.”

IdeaFlood’s attempts to collect on the patent date back to 2004. Attempts to access their website for additional information returned errors at press time.

Since Google has been over-representing site authority in their relevancy algorithms many sites like eBay have begun abusing the hole with the use of infinite subdomains. These techniques not only effect branded search results, but also carry over to many other competitive keywords. 

Creating Shadow Brands & Buying Top Ranked Competing Sites

While small businesses are worried about the risks of buying or renting a few links, some large corporations are launching shadow brands or buying out competing domains en mass. There are thousands or millions of other examples, so it is unfair for me to point any out, but here are a few for the sake of argument.

• Monster.com has a near unlimited number of education related domains, with a near identical user experience at almost all of them.
• Bankrate has a double listing at #2 and #3 for mortgage calculator. They also bought the #1 ranked site.
• How many different verticals does Yahoo! cover the Nintendo Wii in? Off the top of my head, at least 9: their brand universe, yahoo tech, yahoo shopping, yahoo news, yahoo directory, ask yahoo, yahoo answers, videogames.yahoo, games.yahoo, etc. (and that doesn’t even count geolocal subdomains for answers, shopping, etc.)

What happened to result diversity? When and why did Google stop caring about that?

Is Buying Links Ethical?

Some people may report paid links, but the fact that there is a mechanism to do so shows how effective link buying is.

Why is buying links bad, when using infinite domains or buying a bunch of sites are both legitimate? Why is it ok for the WSJ to publish this type of content, but wrong for me to do whatever necessary to compete in a marketplace cluttered with that information pollution?

The point here is not to say that big businesses are bad or doing anything wrong, but to show the stupidity Google is relying on when they scaremonger newer and smaller webmasters about the risks of buying a link here or there. The big businesses do all of the above, gain more organic links by being well known, and still buy links because the techniques works. Whatever Google ranks is what people will create more of, so long as it is profitable to do so.

If you create a real brand you can buy more links and be far spammier with your optimization with a lower risk profile, because Google has to rank your site or they lose marketshare. Create something that is best of breed and then market the hell out of it. If marketing requires buying a few links then open up the wallet and get ready to rank.

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Up until today there were only 2 realistic alternatives to retain some control over your RSS subscribers while using Feedburner for collecting stats.

• Redirect Plugins – Such as the Feedburner Redirect Plugin from Ordered List

– this isn’t a perfect solution because the autodiscovery seems to always resolve before the feed is actually added, which results in a proportion of your sunscribers still subscribed to the Feedburner URL

• Feedburner MyBrand – This is a "pro" feature of Feedburner, and allows you to have Feedburner feeds on a subdomain, such as feeds.yourdomain.com

– this is also not perfect, because that is a subdomain – I haven’t seen a site do anything to create an additional redirect to the subdomain to truly keep it on the same domain, but I am sure something should be possible – it also isn’t free – great for profitable blogs, not so great for lots of niche sites

Now there is an alternative, and it is pretty damn smart…

Feedburner Feeds Stats Hack

Mark has come up with an ingenious little hack to use Feedburner stats on his own feeds with a small patch to one of the WordPress core files.

I haven’t personally tested it yet, but I think Mark shows sufficient proof that it does work.

I am not sure how this works with click tracking, feed flares etc, or the best way to use this for email subscriptions. Also the feedburner feed is still there, and that is desirable for anyone migrating from one method to another. On a fresh site maybe you could make the Feedburner feed private so that you are the only one that accesses it.

You would also have to make sure that Feedburner is fetching a feed that is different to the one that is provided to your subscribers, otherwise you end up with a closed loop.

One major benefit of using Feedburner is that their uptime is very impressive, and they are using their bandwidth to serve your RSS. For many publishers that is quite a significant bandwidth saving.

Hopefully Mark will turn this into a plugin to make it easier to use, especially with the more frequent updates to WordPress these days.

Comments

*Originally published at AndyBeard.eu

Furl

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I thought that the System.Uri class contained that information in an easy retrievable way, but no.

Here’s what I came up with instead. It still uses the System.Uri to find the subdomain.

/// <summary>
/// Retrieves the subdomain from the specified URL.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="url">The URL from which to retrieve the subdomain.</param>
/// <returns>The subdomain if it exist, otherwise null.</returns>
private static string GetSubDomain(Uri url)
{
   string host = url.Host;
   if (host.Split('.').Length > 1)
   {
     int index = host.IndexOf(".");
     return host.Substring(0, index);
   }

   return null;
}

To use it, simply put in the URL of your choice like so:

GetSubDomain(Request.Url);

Update

Based on the comments I’ve had so far on this post, I’ve made some changes to the GetSubDomain() method as shown below.

Thanks to Anders and Jacob for the comments.

/// Retrieves the subdomain from the specified URL.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="url">The URL from which to retrieve the subdomain.</param>
/// <returns>The subdomain if it exist, otherwise null.</returns>
private static string GetSubDomain(Uri url)
{
   if (url.HostNameType == UriHostNameType.Dns)
   {
     string host = url.Host;
     if (host.Split('.').Length > 2)
     {
       int lastIndex = host.LastIndexOf(".");
       int index = host.LastIndexOf(".", lastIndex - 1);
       return host.Substring(0, index);
     }
   }

     return null;
}

Comments

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Mads Kristensen currently works as a Senior Developer at Traceworks located
in Copenhagen, Denmark. Mads graduated from Copenhagen Technical Academy with a multimedia degree in
2003, but has been a professional developer since 2000. His main focus is on ASP.NET but is responsible for Winforms, Windows- and
web services in his daily work as well. A true .NET developer with great passion for the simple solution.

http://www.madskristensen.dk/

When you submit a press release through PRWeb and associate that press release with a RSS Group in the PRWeb control panel, the release is then published as part of an RSS feed. This feed url can be pinged to the RSS search engines and also used in an auto discovery tag for RSS feeds in the company web site. That way RSS enabled browsers and feed readers can automatically detect the company press release RSS feed and subscribe to it, even if they do not have a blog.

Until now, the url of the press release RSS feed from PRWeb has used the syntax of: http://www.rsspad.com/rss2a/45753.xml and can now be setup as: http://rss.toprankresults.com. We are not yet setup with this feature, so my example URL is not yet functioning.

What does this mean for users of PRWeb? You need to be using the RSS functionality in the first place. If your site does not have a blog, but you want to make it easy for readers and journalists to find and subscribe to your company news, then the PRWeb press release RSS feed feature is for you.

Being able to direct subscribers to a sub-domain, ie: rss.yourdomainname.com rather than a rsspad.com url offers some branding benefit. The release from PRWeb is very optimistic that this feature will “provide increased traffic to their individual domains”. What it won’t do is affect the link popularity to your main site since most search engines see sub-domains as a different site than your main www address.

Is it worth using then? I think it is for two reasons:

1. Branding – Using a sub-domain allows you to use your own company domain name when you publish the feed. This brings a sense of familiarity to the user.

2. Control – Should you decide to start a blog or not use PRWeb’s hosted RSS service, then you are not tied down to a URL that they control. This is very much like using FeedBurner. The free RSS feed service that FeedBurner offers uses the syntax: feeds.feedburner.com/yourfeedhere. If you use FeedBurner Pro, you can map that feed to a sub-domain or url on your own site, www.mysite.com/rssfeed or feed.mysite.com then you are not tied to FeedBurner should you decide you want to change services or if you want to change how you publish your RSS feed.

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Lee Odden is President and Founder of
TopRank Online Marketing, specializing in organic SEO, blog
marketing and online public relations. He’s been cited as a search
marketing expert by publications including U.S. News & World Report and
The Economist and has implemented successful search marketing programs
with top BtoB companies of all sizes. Odden shares his marketing
expertise at Online Marketing Blog offering
daily news, interviews and best practices.

What is a subdomain? Is it hard for a sub-domain to rank well? When should a use a subdomain? What are the SEO benefits? What are the alternatives to a subdomain? These are all very good questions. Lucky for you, all the answers are right here. So let’s get to it.

What is a subdomain?

A subdomain is just as it sounds, a sub or second-level of a domain. A standard domain looks as follows: www.mydomain.com. A sub domain would be http://prefix.mydomain.com. Subdomains do not take on the “WWW”.

All subs start with “http://subdomain/maindomain.Com.

That’s simple enough, I think. We have all seen a subdomain before. On to the next question.

Is it hard for a subdomain to rank well?

Subdomains rank just as well as regular domains. Having a subdomain doesn’t decrease your chances of ranking on search engines. You’ll just have to treat each subdomain as a new, individual site. This means work on building PR and links. As with any domain, you don’t get a free ride.

What are the benefits to using a subdomain?

Let’s say you had a site that had many categories in it. If you were to submit to directories you could submit each subdomain as it’s own individual category and not get penalized. The links from the subdomains to the main domain would be looked upon as one way links from another domain.

What are the drawbacks to using subdomains?

Each subdomain would be looked at by search engines as a new site, which means you will need to do everything you would normally do for a new site. In short, creating backlinks, battling the sandbox, and all other problems associated with domain development are still present. If this sounds like too much trouble, you may want to consider creating subfolders within the domain. This would look like www.mydomain.com/folder.

If a sub,domain becomes banned will it effect the main domain?

The answer is yes. It may get the main domain banned if they are linked to each other. There has been proof of main domains being banned, yet I have heard of many instances where they have not. The main domain may not get banned under certain circumstances. The question shouldn’t be whether the main domain can get banned because of a subdomain, but instead, why would your subdomain get banned in the first place. If you want to experiment with untested or controversial methods, do so on a new domain.

So should I use a subdomain?

If you can afford the time an money required to develop out each subdomain and if your main domain would be too convoluted by having too much on it, I’d say yes. If not, save yourself the heartache and extra work. Just make your site easy to navigate, use folders and you should do just fine.

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To learn more about web design and SEO visit http://www.mr-seo.com. There you can request a free web design quote. Also visit Joe’s blogs at http://mrseonewz.blogspot.com/ and http://mr-seo.blogspot.com

Registering URLs that contained subdomains proved a sticky issue for Google Base. The latest update has corrected the problem, which Google described in the Base blog.

For users with multiple sites located under the same subdomain, the problematic bug prevented registrations of subdomain URLs beyond the first one registered. Google illustrated the problem as follows:

Apparently this was a show-stopper for a lot of potential Google Base users. Now that it has been cleared away, more content should find its way into the service.

—
Email the author here.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Now I will save you the horrible trouble of what goes on during the Web hosting server side of this. Trust me, it is nothing exciting and probably nothing you need to worry about just yet. Most of you should know by now that when you create a new folder inside your Web hosting account, the directory for it should look something like this:

Without Subdomain: http://www.yoursite.com/blog

Now that is all fine and dandy, but it might be a little hard to remember. Now what if you got a different address that pointed at that same exact spot, but was easier to remember? Try this on for size:

With Subdomain: http://blog.yoursite.com

Did you see what happened? We dropped the “www” and put in “blog”. Now that this is up there, you can drop the use of “/blog” at the end. This my friends is a subdomain.

How can you create one of these beauties on your own? Well, your Web hosting company should have provided you with a control panel when signing up for your Web hosting account. If they did, you should have a setting somewhere in there telling you how you can get it done. It differs from control panel to control panel, so I will leave that much as homework for you.

In effect you are telling the server that “http://blog.yoursite.com” points to your “blog” folder. This can be done with any folder that is inside your root or home directory. Now how would a folder look if it was inside the blog folder? Like this:

Without Subdomain: http://www.yoursite.com/blog/mitchrules

With Subdomain: http://blog.yoursite.com/mitchrules

Now why would you want to use subdomains? For easier navigation and organization. The shorter you are able to make a URL, the more likely a visitor is going to remember it and come back.

Mitch Keeler is a guy who likes to help people out in his own charismatic and odd way. Instead of showing somebody how to do something, he much more enjoys having people see the problem and the solution through his own eyes. Mitch has worked as an article and content writer for various Web sites around the globe.

Mitch Keeler is also a former Customer Service Director and Customer Service Manager for a large Web hosting company. Please feel free to contact Mitch or look over his impressive resume of accomplishments.