Category: Search Engine Optimization

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Can You Even Get SEO Juice From a Subdomain?

For best search engine benefits what is the best configuration for your blog a subdomain or a subdirectory? First, it is important to clearly identify the difference of a subdirectory versus a subdomain.

Subdirectory example: http://www.mccordweb.com/weblogs/

Subdomain example: http://blog.mccordweb.com

How search engines handle the two is entirely different. So set up determines the link juice and search engine capital that a blogsite will pass to the parent website (in the above example the parent site is mccordweb.com).

Here is a very concise explanation of how search engines index, spider, and count subdomains:

“… Google considers sub domains separate from their parent domains:  sub.yoursite.com is considered a different site altogether compared to yoursite.com when it comes to search engine authority.” You can read the full and very interesting article here.

Although you can track subdirectories and subdomains using Google Analytics with special code inserts, how search engine weight and evaluate content that is resides off-domain as in a subdirectory domain is crucial to your organic placement strategy.

It is clear that I am not alone in finding that a subdirectory domain is considered as if it was a separate domain by the search engines. You can find out more by following this thread to the Webmaster World forum.

“It  [a subdomain] is treated much more like an independent domain in many respects – for example, if urls from both the root domain and a subdomain show up on the same page of search results, they do not cluster together.”

Matt Cutts says this on the issue:

“My personal preference on subdomains vs. subdirectories is that I usually prefer the convenience of subdirectories for most of my content. A subdomain can be useful to separate out content that is completely different. Google uses subdomains for distinct products such news.google.com or maps.google.com, for example. If you’re a newer webmaster or SEO, I’d recommend using subdirectories until you start to feel pretty confident with the architecture of your site.”

The bottom-line is that a subdomain is simply a way to mask the URL of an off-domain site or blog location and give the APPEARANCE that it is installed within the server where the parent site resides. Search engines consider the content separate and will weight it an index it separately from the parent website. What is crucial to understand is that any links that point to the subdomain blog or website do not flow through and add capital to the parent domain.

For best use of blogging and mini-websites, it is still by far best to install them in subdirectories and not subdomains.

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SEO Is Much More Than Code Optimization

Organic placement improvement for your website is much more than code optimization. In fact I have seen some sites whose code is not really optimized still place well. But for the typical business website code optimization is a start and just one of the pieces of the puzzle that need to be put together for better Web visibility.

First off, it is very important to understand that where you place on the search engines is now much more that what is happening back on your own website. Now it is about all these things working together:

  • Inbound links from new sites and authority websites
  • Facebook activity and regular status updates
  • Twitter activity and follower growth as well as retweets from authority followers
  • On-domain blogging to build Web authority and keyword density
  • Quality content, more than blogging, press releases and white papers are needed
  • Website code optimization
  • Regular updates to your home page and website content

What I have found is that once a site hits the tipping point by doing all of these things on a regular basis they insulate themselves from big drops in the search engines. I have seen sites stay at nearly the same search positions without additional code tweaks and even improve from just the above updates. It does not require a monthly source code update to keep and maintain position organically. I have however found that improvement from a poor position once these strategies have been implemented is slow but steady.

If you need help in these area, I encourage you to visit our website to find out how to start with an evaluation so you can create a blue print for how your website can get better organic placement.

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Five Years Ago I Had Great Organic Placement

I have had a rash of prospects tell me that their organic placement has dropped so much after they paid a ton of money for a new website that they want to repost the website they had five years ago to get their old traffic and Google.com placement back. Sorry, but there is no time machine that will take us back to the time you placed highly on Google.com.

A website is not a brochure; you create it once and then hand it out for years. It is a work of art, a puzzle, a tool, a selling machine. It needs care and it needs content updates. What worked three years ago and five years ago certainly does not work now. Even if we could reload a website that performed well five years ago on Google, it would most likely not perform in the same place today.

The Web has changed dramatically in the time that I have been providing professional services and it has significantly changed in the past three years and seriously changed even this past year. What is important for website owners to understand is that now the content is crucial for organic placement, but more than that, it cannot just stop at great content.

A well placed website (in the organic search results) needs:

  1. great content that provides features and benefits
  2. content that is informational beyond what you sell and service
  3. regular updates of interesting articles, white papers, and informational updates
  4. social networking work off site on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+
  5. a blog that is updated a minimum of three times a week and  deep links to pages in your website

That in a nutshell is a web authority site! A website that is beyond a brochure but provides real help and information for readers not only on services and products that are sold but on topics and ideas. This is no five page website that’s for sure.

It takes time and money to build and maintain a web authority site, but the rewards can be big. With a site that is well placed organically, you may not need to spend quite so much in advertising to get traffic to your site. The older your authority site is, the more links you will naturally earn which will continue to improve your placement as well. Additionally, the depth of information you have on your website will let prospects know you know your business and are the go-to person for their needs.

What used to work five years ago for organic placement certainly will not work now, but quality content and information-rich web pages will never go out of style. I invite you to visit our “authority website” and see if we can help you too.

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The Google Analytics Whiners Need to Stop Now

Even on this past Friday the spillover comments about Google blocking referrer data into Google Analytics for signed in users was ramped up from just being irritating to the full rant level. Here are some of the titles of articles that I have read to give you an idea of how rabid people in my industry are getting about this topic.

Dear Google, This is War

Google Whores Out Users With False Privacy Claims

SEO Under Attack – The Google Analytics Keyword Data Apocalypse

Now We Will Need To Pay To See Keyword Referrer Data?

Google Turning the Lights Out on Organic Data

These are just a few of the articles on this topic that I wrote about this past Monday’s from an announcement that Google made last week that talks about Google turning off the referrer for signed in Google users when they do a search. My comments to all of these writers and whiners is Google is not a non-profit. Everything they do is for money. We cannot forget this. Google.com and Google Analytics are their platform’s their intellectual property, their rules, searches their way!

I want to bring to everyone’s mind that Google Analytics used to be called Urchin and monthly subscription to the service was in excessive of $100 monthly for data and tracking. Google bought Urchin and every webmaster around the world signed up to get the code and get Google Analytics for free. Now that Google has decided to remove some of the data from THEIR free tool the world is falling over itself whining about the loss and trying to brow beat Google into giving it back.

It’s time to get real and realize that Google is a platform that pushes advertising. Google will do whatever it takes to keep other advertisers from scrapping its referral data so they [other advertisers] can use the information to make money. Google will work hard to protect itself from privacy lawsuits as they cost money and hurt their [Google’s] reputation. Google is not providing a search engine or organic results for free, it provides them so you will click their ads so they make money.

Stop whining and start checking to see if there is another statistical tool that will give you what YOU want. I think that you’ll be hard pressed to find one that is free and provides the data that Google Analytics has. Oh, wait, there is always Web Trends and Hub Spot available… but for a price.