OSE Domains & Subdomains

[Ecreativeworks]

Is there a compelling reason that OSE treats subdomains as part of a parent domain, rather than as a separate site? Or is this just a technical limitation?

I ask because it's my understanding that Google treats subdomains more like separate domains than like parts of the parent domain. OSE treating them more like folders creates some frustrating situations when researching niches that are heavily filled with blospot and wordpress.com blogs.

First of all, the domain authority in these situations is not at all indicative of the strength of the site. It also makes it hard to evaluate linking root domains at a glance, since all blogspot blogs count as one domain. So to see all blogspot sites linking you have to go to the full link list -- where each site may be listed hundreds of times -- and you can't group them because they're all considered the same domain.

To be sure you when researching these niches you can just throw out domain authority as a metric, and export every report to excel where you can sort things in a way to make it easier to separate sites. But if there isn't a compelling SEO reason to have OSE function this way, I'd love to see those subdomains treated as separate sites so I can have access to all the easy to use SEOmoz metrics and layouts without the extra work.

And of course if there is a compelling SEO reason for subdomains to be treated as domains, I'd love to be educated! : )

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Howdy,

That's a really good observation and good feedback.

OSE and the MozBar default to Root Domain metrics, so it makes working with subdomains a little less convenient. One of the reasons that subdomains are grouped with domains is because in most cases, that's the way folks work with and research their sites. For example, if you were researching www.seomoz.org, this is closely tied to the root domain seomoz.org.

Yes, it's a little frustrating when working with wordpress blogs, and other subdomains where the root metrics really have nothing to do with the website in question.

The good news is you can always view subdomain metrics. There's even a toggle switch on the MozBar that allows you to switch between root domain and subdomain metrics. In the case of blogs hosted on Wordpress, you really need to ignore the root domain metrics - so it can be inconvenient for OSE to display these prominently, but the subdomain metrics are available in the "compare link metrics" tab.

But one area I really have to agree with you: We have Page Authority and Domain Authority, so it would be awesome if we had a Subdomain Authority.

Regardless, thanks for the feedback.