We know something is going on,
Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2025 6:30 am
That led me to the other thing I really wanted to get out of this, which was — and when I brought it up, I kind of rolled my eyes, "Are we really going down this rabbit hole" — the subdomain versus subfolder question. You've seen me talk about this. You've seen people like Rand talk about this, where we've seen cases and we have case studies of moving blog.example.com to example.com/blog and changing something and getting growth.
and yet Google's official line has long been: "We don't treat these things differently. There's nothing special about subfolders. We're perfectly happy with all domains. Do whatever's right for your australia number data ." We've done this kind of back and forth a few times. The way I told John, I said, "We've seen these case studies. How would you explain that?"
They try to figure out what the site is about.
To his credit, John said, "Yeah, we've seen them too." So he said, yeah, Google has seen these things too. He admitted that it's true. He admitted that it happens. The way he explained it ties into this domain authority thing in my mind, which is that the way they think about it is: Are these pages on this subdomain part of the same website as the things on the main domain?
That's kind of the basic question. They try and figure out, as he said, "What's the connection to this site?" We've all heard of sites where subdomains are completely different sites. If you think about a blogspot.com or a WordPress.com domain, the subdomains could be owned and managed by completely different people, and there would be no reason to go to that authority. But what Google is trying to do is try to say, "Is this subdomain part of this main site?"
and yet Google's official line has long been: "We don't treat these things differently. There's nothing special about subfolders. We're perfectly happy with all domains. Do whatever's right for your australia number data ." We've done this kind of back and forth a few times. The way I told John, I said, "We've seen these case studies. How would you explain that?"
They try to figure out what the site is about.
To his credit, John said, "Yeah, we've seen them too." So he said, yeah, Google has seen these things too. He admitted that it's true. He admitted that it happens. The way he explained it ties into this domain authority thing in my mind, which is that the way they think about it is: Are these pages on this subdomain part of the same website as the things on the main domain?
That's kind of the basic question. They try and figure out, as he said, "What's the connection to this site?" We've all heard of sites where subdomains are completely different sites. If you think about a blogspot.com or a WordPress.com domain, the subdomains could be owned and managed by completely different people, and there would be no reason to go to that authority. But what Google is trying to do is try to say, "Is this subdomain part of this main site?"