Can You Dig Out Of Your Google Panda Hole By Offloading To Subdomains?

The Wall Street Journal has an article out today reporting that Hubpages, acting on advice from Google, has found that using subdomains seems to have gotten some of their content to recover from a Panda penalty.

By moving some of their content to new subdomains, it either has escaped the penalty or is being assessed afresh.

The article said:

In June, a top Google search engineer, Matt Cutts, wrote to Edmondson that he might want to try subdomains, among other things.

The HubPages subdomain testing began in late June and already has shown positive results. Edmondson’s own articles on HubPages, which saw a 50% drop in page views after Google’s Panda updates, have returned to pre-Panda levels in the first three weeks since he activated subdomains for himself and several other authors. The other authors saw significant, if not full, recoveries of Web traffic.

Panda is known as a site-wide, domain specific penalty. Some of the advice given by Google was to move low-quality content to a new domain or remove the content completely. It seems like Google, in this case, is treating the subdomains on Hubpages as separate domains and thus when moving the low-quality content from the main www to the subdomain on Hubpages, Google is treating them as separate domains.

But does Google treat all subdomains as unique domains? Read Vanessa Fox’s article, How Changes To The Way Google Handles Subdomains Impact SEO.

A Google spokesperson gave us an insightful comment about the use of subdomains for this purpose. Google said:

Subdomains can be useful to separate out content that is completely different from the rest of a site — for example, on domains such as wordpress.com. However, site owners should not expect that simply adding a new subdomain on a site will trigger a boost in ranking.

More Google Panda Tips & Advice:

• Why Google Panda Is More A Ranking Factor Than Algorithm Update
• Coming Soon: Google Panda Update 2.2
• Hit By Panda Update? Google Has 23 Questions To Ask Yourself To Improve
• 5 New Tactics For SEO Post-Panda
• Panda 2.0: Google Rolls Out Panda Update Internationally & Incorporates Searcher Blocking Data
• When Pandas Attack: Online Retailers Need To React
• Lessons Learned at SMX West: Google’s Panda Update, White Hat Cloaking & Link Building
• The Farmer/Panda Update: New Information From Google and The Latest from SMX West

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.