In what may be a significant development in the Search Engine Optimisation industry, Google is changing the way it handles subdomains. Previously, subdomains were treated as separate domains, with all the entailing consequences and advantages. Webmasters used to take advantage of this fact, creating potentially limitless domains that took advantage of Google’s linience. Unfortunately, this was massively abused by black hat practitioners that used subdomains to spin off thousands of irrelevant domain names that actually ranked high for various search terms, giving black hatters an immense upper hand.
Google has now decided to treat subdomains as folders of main domains. This development has great ramifications for as well as the domaining industry. This will increase the value of good top level domain names, as it will reduce competition from similarly worded subdomains.
Andy Stats ran a blog post a week ago that detailed the use of subdomains to create domains that clogged the upper echelons of the SERPS for fairly competitive keywords. This may have been the one incident that finally persuaded Google to change its treatment of subdomains.
