Subdomains seen as one site

[AlanMosley]

Earlier this month Google announced that sub-domains are now
be treated as one site. At first I thought this was good news as I like to use
sub-domains for separation of categories and the like. But what about links
from one sub-domain to the other, they uised to be external links now they are
internal links. If you don’t have many external links, I would say that the
cross sub-domain links would have been important, if you have a lot of external
links then the flow of link juice would be of more benefit. I think overall its
is a good thing.

Does anyone have any opinions about this or know of any writings
on the subject since this announcement?

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/08/reorganizing-internal-vs-external.html

[SL_SEM]

From reading that article it looks like they are doing this for their webmaster tools, but don't mention if they are combining subdomain links and primary domain links into their SERP calculations as if they were the same site.

Knowing if it affected SERP calculations is more important. Have you seen any articles on that (going to search shortly for that ;))

That would be more interesting to me as our site currently has at least 6 subdomains for publicly accessible sites, and while I would love to move them all under sub folders it requires a decent bit of effort on our side. If Google just counted them all under the same link profile for rankings then it would save time and money, and give Google a better view of our web presence as a whole. This would be better for the end user as the end user would be able to get to our blogs, forums, portal, and API knowledgebase easier from search results when just searching for our company name. So I can see it being useful for Google since it is useful for users.

For that article (webmaster tool purposes) I think it makes sense as it helps simplify reporting for the "www" subdomain. It makes it easier to aggregate your data, and see it how Google really sees it (especially if you have a rewrite from www.example.com to just example.com or vice versa). So it sounds good to me

[AlanMosley]

I get your point, what they dont make clear is if you only list the root domain then how do they know you own the sub domains also, aer you to put the same verification code in each site?

And if they are going to see then as the same site are they going to sdee them that way for ranking? or do they already for that reason?

[RyanKent]

The announcement is informative but in my opinion highly misunderstood.

Dr. Pete asked the key question which was answered in a reply from the original author:

"This update only changes how links are displayed in Webmaster Tools. It doesn't affect how links are valued in relation to the search algorithm or ranking. It has nothing to do with Panda, nothing to do with keywords, nothing to do with PageRank."

In short, nothing has changed. The only difference iis how links are displayed when you are viewing the root domain in Google WMT.

[AlanMosley]

Yes i did not read too clearly, the comments explaned much more.

but it makes one think,about the old question  about how google handles subdomains(for rankings). when does it see them as the same site and when does it see them as seperate.
I am guesisng they already do rank sites using the rules in article. I look after a site that has nothing more then a home, about, search and contact page on root domain, with several sub-domains. yet the home page ranks well for all the subdomains catgories.

[SL_SEM]

Exactly so I am thinking they will basically just aggregate any sites that use the same domain under the same webmaster account.

[RyanKent]

I am not a legal expert but it is my understanding if you own the root domain, then you own the subdomains. Even if you use sites like wordpress.com or blogspot the legal owner of the subdomains is the root domain owner. If you violate their terms of service, the main company will kick the subdomain user off and take control over the account.

With respect to Google WMT, I think it's a convenience thing. In most cases, you want to know what other sites are linking to your site. It is usually not helpful to know your own subdomain is linking to your root domain. You expect that as you do other internal linking. It makes the analysis of external linking a bit easier to remove all internal links.

[AlanMosley]

Well you want to see them as they are considered for ranking. If for ranking a subdomain link is considered an internal link then yes, thats how WMT should report it.