Search Engine Panel

At last week’s PubCon search marketing conference in Las Vegas, a question was raised to Matt Cutts regarding Google’s treatment towards subdomains and subdirectories, also known as folders. Just to recap on convention, we have, subdomain.yoursite.com/subdirectory.

It turns out that an algorithm change was actually implemented weeks ago regarding this issue, and that subdomains of a website will be treated the same way as folders in terms of search engine result pages. To be more specific, the handling of folders will be changed to respond more like subdomains.

Traditionally, Google would pair results together for webpages with the same subdomain, but did not do so for pages under the same folders. For certain queries, especially long-tailed ones, the SERPs displayed long listings of webpages that all came from the same website. Now that folders will be treated similarly to subdomains, the SERPs are a bit cleaner and more user-friendly.

Nevertheless, subdomains still play an integral part of webdesign in the logical branching of a site?s content and purpose. And with this recent algorithm change, webmasters can focus on properly using subdomains and/or subdirectories.

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