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Google Classifies Subdomains As Part Of The Main Domain Now Very relevant to our purposes... http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...-external.html ... Today we’re making a change to the way we categorize link data in Webmaster Tools. As you know, Webmaster Tools lists links pointing to your site in two separate categories: links coming from other sites, and links from within your site. Today’s update won’t change your total number of links, but will hopefully present your backlinks in a way that more closely aligns with your idea of which links are actually from your site vs. from other sites. You can manage many different types of sites in Webmaster Tools: a plain domain name (example.com), a subdomain (www.example.com or cats.example.com), or a domain with a subfolder path (www.example.com/cats/ orwww.example.com/users/catlover/). Previously, only links that started with your site’s exact URL would be categorized as internal links: so if you entered www.example.com/users/catlover/ as your site, links from www.example.com/users/catlover/profile.html would be categorized as internal, but links from www.example.com/users/ or www.example.com would be categorized as external links. This also meant that if you entered www.example.com as your site, links from example.com would be considered external because they don’t start with the same URL as your site (they don’t contain www). Most people think of example.com and www.example.com as the same site these days, so we’re changing it such that now, if you add either example.com or www.example.com as a site, links from both the www and non-www versions of the domain will be categorized as internal links. We’ve also extended this idea to include other subdomains, since many people who own a domain also own its subdomains—so links from cats.example.com or pets.example.com will also be categorized as internal links for www.example.com. If you own a site that’s on a subdomain (such as googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com) or in a subfolder (www.google.com/support/webmasters/) and don’t own the root domain, you’ll still only see links from URLs starting with that subdomain or subfolder in your internal links, and all others will be categorized as external links. We’ve made a few backend changes so that these numbers should be even more accurate for you. Note that, if you own a root domain like example.com or www.example.com, your number of external links may appear to go down with this change; this is because, as described above, some of the URLs we were previously classifying as external links will have moved into the internal links report. Your total number of links (internal + external) should not be affected by this change. |
Very interesting article Calculito, thanks for sharing, in the short term, it begs the question are weblinks more valuable than gotos for internal linking or are each now treated the same. Also do you think we may see a few drops in PR and inevitably the serps for our .tels if google are now classifying subdomain links as simple internal linking, I believe this was a strength of .tel originally and part of the reason .tels rank highly and quickly. Time will tell, any thoughts anyone? Still, it's a great reminder to us all to keep working those backlinks. Should be an interesting thread. |
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That is the question. Does it mean that PR will be the same for every subdomain in a site?. I hope it doesn´t. On the other hand, it´s good news, because we can analyze all our subdomains. For example we´ll be able to detect broken links in all our subdomains, so far it was possible just in case you added every subdomain in your webmasters tools.[/size] |
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Wow... this needs some thought ! I have always found subdomains in my .coms to be treated by the search engines as different sites, which is very useful for SEO purposes, and it has looked like .tels were being treated the same. One of .tels strengths is the subdomain structure, which forces the .tel owner to make every page a different subdomain, so that gives it an individual identity and meant that cross-linking within a .tel domain was counted as an external link, much better for SEO purposes than an internal link. It will be interesting to see how much, it it all, this change affects .tel search engine rankings. If it does affect it, it will be directories with multiple cross-linking within the .tel domain that lose out, rather than personal .tel domains where the info about the person is mostly contained in the single home page of the .tel domain. As Telrific once said, Only time will .tel ! Mike Seaton[/size] |
