Does poor quality on a subdomain affect a domain (with regards to Panda)?

[nicole.healthline]

We are considering moving some thin content from our site to a subdomain as a potential "panda" fix. But, we are unsure if Google will treat the subdomain as a completely separate domain or not. Does anyone have any data / Google info that might answer this question? Thanks in advance for your help!

[AlanBleiweiss]

simply moving thin content, isn't advised under any circumstance, unless you don't care about organic search for the site it's on.  If that is the case, then the site its on should be a stand-alone domain, not just a subdomain.

While the impact of it being on a subdomain will be less significant than the main domain, it's all part of the root domain package.  Everything on a subdomain ultimately impacts the root domain and all others in that group.

[David_ODonnell]

"Panda is a filter that Google has designed to spot what it believes are low-quality pages. Have too many low-quality pages, and Panda effectively flags your entire site. Being Pandified, Pandification — whatever clever name you want to call it — doesn’t mean that your entire site is out of Google. But it does mean that pages within your site carry a penalty designed to help ensure only the better ones make it into Google’s top results."From http://searchengineland.com/why-google-panda-is-more-a-ranking-factor-than-algorithm-update-82564Sub domains are not treated entirely separately. Moving content will not help, you need to improve it or lose it.

[nicole.healthline]

Thank you for your quick response. The "thin" content constitutes about 35% of the current traffic, and has potential for improvement in the future, so we prefer not to permanently eliminate it. We are searching for an immediate solution to show Google that content on the primary domain has improved. Do you have any external sources (google quotes) to show that poor content on a subdomain affects the primary domain as well? Thank you.

[nicole.healthline]

Thank you. Can you elaborate on "entirely separately"? Exactly how separate are subdomains? Would no-indexing the content be a solution?

[AlanBleiweiss]

I only have my own experience with clients and unfortunately can not point to case studies.

One alternative would be to consider keeping it on the main site and finding a way to consolidate some or all of it so you end up with more content per page.

[nicole.healthline]

Good suggestion, but unfortunately the content cannot be consolidated or changed (it is a directory of information). So, you do have personal experience with clients that shows that poor quality on a subdomain will affect the primary domain? Thank you!

[nicole.healthline]

Also, does it depend on how the subdomain is treated? I know in some cases Google will treat the subdomain as a separate domain, depending on interlinking.

[AlanBleiweiss]

the only way to inoculate the main domain if you go with a subdomain is if the topical focus of each is very different.  If they're very similar, it's much more difficult to pull off.  Of course if they're different enough, that's valid reason to not interlink.

If they're totally related, and there's no interlinking, it could be perceived as attempting to stuff search results with multiple entries.