Google and Subdomains
Is it still safe to use subdomains or is it better off to use a separate domains all-together? There was a lot of buzz regarding Google’s supposed change in their SERP to treat sub-domains as sub-folders of the same domain a few months ago. Some people loved the idea and some thought the sky was going to fall for them, and I was closely monitoring the situation at the time as basically all of my sites were using subdomains for good reasons. Well, it seems like nothing much has changed since then, as Hugo Guzman at Zeta Interactive pointed out in his post about subdomains still dominate the SERPs for major brand names.
Hugo proceeded to list a couple of examples of how some major brands dominated the SERPs when the brand was used as the search term. I could totally understand where he’s coming from about these results as I have been seeing these kind of results on a daily basis. Is this really a bad thing though? I actually think it is a good move on Google to not perceive subdomains as part of the larger domain site. There are good reasons for this argument.
- It is better from a branding and marketing perspective to use sub-domains to distinguish the themes of a huge website
- It’s easier for multiple teams to maintain various parts of a large website
- You cannot always get the brand-associated domains you want when you expand the scope of your site
- If people search my brand, obviously I would like to offer them as many choices as possible, at least until they improve the site links feature to reflect more useful pages
A brand dominating a couple pages are really rare occasions unless the brand is as huge as ESPN, Google and AOL. I mean, if your content is good enough to knock those sites off the first few spots, there’s really nothing stopping you from doing so.
