Sub-domains for keyword targeting? (specific example question)

[naturalsociety]

Hey everyone, I have a question I believe is interesting and may help others as well.

Our competitor heavily (over 100-200) uses sub-domains to rank in the search engines... and is doing quite well. What's strange, however, is that all of these sub-domains are just archives -- they're 100% duplicate content! An example can be seen here where they just have a bunch of relevant posts archived with excerpts.

How is this ranking so well? Many of them are top 5 for keywords in the 100k+ range. In fact their #1 source of traffic is SEO for many of the pages.

As an added question: is this effective if you were to actually have a quality/non-duplicate page?

Thanks! Loving this community.

[katemorris]

While this is not the best use of their time and something that as a consultant I'd recommend against, the content on that page is not duplicated from what I can tell. The page is about aspartame and links to other articles on the subject. It looks like the content is on other sites, but I can't determine who scraped whom. Can you tell me what page you have that is competing against this one? I'd be happy to give some advice. But for right now, I can't see an issue here.

And no, generally putting things on subdomains is not effective but done right it can be. I don't want to say it isn't overall but we traditionally recommend against it.

[naturalsociety]

Thanks for this great reply, Kate.

It appears that they actually must be editing the excerpts from the originals so that it isn't duplicate. This site, on their sub-domains specifically, dominates a large number of terms such as aspartame, kirll oil, gmo, etc. -- sometimes multiple times on the front page.

We have a few modest pages competing for many terms, including this one for aspartame and this one for 'genetically modified foods' -- this one getting quite a few linkbacks.

On a side note, we have a page that is the 10th most shared in 2011 with over 236,000 shares and it's still not ranking hardly at all.

Thanks a ton for any feedback, it is very much appreciated.

[katemorris]

The one piece of feedback I can give is that your pages have way too much advertising. If Panda didn't affect you before I can see it doing it in the future. This competitor has tons of resources on the topic and seems to be a better result for broad terms like aspartame. If you want to rank for broad terms like that, I'd work at developing a resource center for searchers of that term. They could be looking up that broad of a word for many reasons, answer those and don't focus on the ads. Focus on being the best answer for the query.

[naturalsociety]

Thanks a lot, Kate.

This makes a lot of sense, and I really do need to re-visit my advertising format.

I was under the impression that since the sidebar ads are simply images that Google may not see them as purely advertisements? These ads are the entirety of our current income so it is a confusing situation as to how to work this issue.

Thanks for your answer & future contributions.

[katemorris]

No, they did all of their research just about that. Trust me, they can tell. Try to limit the number of ads, don't remove them, just limit to no more than 2 per page.