Keyword Suggestions Tool & Different Subdomains

[danny.wood]

Hey all,

Was reading Dan Shure's brilliant post on the Keyword Planner, and decided to plug a few of my own pages into the URL-suggester tool as well. What I got back was nothing short of strange.

After plugging in our Features page, (which describes our Social Media Contesting Platform,) and getting back a bunch of suggestions related to Dr Seuss and Interior Design Scholarships, I realized that the Keyword Suggestion tool was being broken by our subdomains.

I looked for precedent on my particular issue, but I think I might not be searching properly. Could anyone provide any insight into whether or not this might affect how spiders see the content on Strutta.com, whether or not this is just something that will affect the Keyword Suggestions Tool or actual SERP rankings, and if this content is already present elsewhere on MOZ, a link to said content?

Much obliged

[evolvingSEO]

Dan who? Sorry for the delay here, was on vacation. But let me see if I can help.

This is a very intriguing. I think the best way to confirm/deny if this is an actual issue, is by going to Webmaster Tools -> Google Index -> Content Keywords - webmaster tools will be registered of course for just www and in theory should not take into account any of the subdomains. So if a subdomain is adversely affecting the main domain, those erroneous Keywords would show up probably in WMT.

Another way to check would be the related: search operator which when I run on Strutta's root domain, I get sites that make sense - other social media, facebook and contest sites. A straight branded search for "strutta" looks pretty strong too, everything is relevant.

Lastly you could look in "impressions" under webmaster tools for the www site - if you are "ranking" www pages for those extraneous keywords with random pages that could be a signal of something weird.

But I do think this is probably more a question of how the AdWords tool works - which to be honest I am not exactly sure, but probably a big combination of domain content, page content, anchor text from links etc.

Hope that helps!

[danny.wood]

Thanks for getting back, Dan! Doing these checks definitely satisfies me that it's a non-issue.. Content Keywords gives me "facebook", "strutta", "contest", etc.

Interesting bug with Adwords though, they should consider doing subdomain-specific "research", since I think that in the case of SaaS businesses especially, this makes a lot more sense.

Cheers,
-Danny