Google Favoritism is getting old

[google junky]

www.statelinetack.com and shop.statelinetack.com yet again.

Google ignores some sites is seems. This PetsMART owned site has been identical to its subdomain for months now. Sending reports of this to google does no good. The favortism is getting old. Only till Nov 28th did they both show up on the same first page.

A search for Tack
A search for Horse Tack
A search for State Line Tack

Their subdomain and main domain are within the first page of results. With the exception of the cache google has for the shop.domain, they have been matched content for a long time with no penalties. The cache shows they had some updates going on.


On the SEO side of things.......
During jagger their main domain vanished and the sub.domain took its place.

Is this supposed to be the new strategy to alg changes or temp loss of placement?

[greeneagle]

They are a PR6 Site with 250 GOOG IBLs and 6,500 MSN IBLs...

Where's the anomaly?

Where's the surprise?

What's out of whack?

Ken

[google junky]

well, I totally agree. All their good points take precedence over the duplicate content issue. I would hope to be a pr6 with all their good attributes so I could get away with cheating the algo around christams time. I would love to meet this person that is making these SEO decisions and pick his/her brain. I wouldn't have thought a big company like PETsMART would have to do things like this.

Thanks for replying Ken.

[greeneagle]

I have seen many examples where PR6 seemed to be the magic number introducing initial levels of "Preferred Site Status".

Ken

[google junky]

I wanted to give an update to this thread.

The site statelinetack.com has now went from PR6 to PR0.
Their Mirrored subdomain shop.statelinetack.com still holds as a PR6

A little progress was made by Google to fix both subdomain and the main domain having the same PR when they were mirrors of each other.

Maybe temporary? I have no idea...

[greeneagle]

Hello google junky, haven't seen you much around lately!

Hope everything is going well.

FYI -- I am still seeing a PR6 here too:
http://www.statelinetack.com/slt/main.jsp

Ken

[google junky]

Everything is going great here. I have been so overloaded with work that I haven’t had much time to do anything else.

Good to see you again greeneagle


PR6 for http://www.statelinetack.com/slt/main.jsp That is interesting.

Doing a search for tack or horse tack
The main domain is the one that actually comes up in the results.

I'll have to dig deeper on this.

[greeneagle]

google junky,

Sounds like you may have been "duped" somewhere. If so, consider a 301 for that instance.

Ken

[crankydave]

Good to see you GJ!!!

Unfortunately, this is nothing new. Google does it themself.

They wanted to treat subdomains as separate sites, they got what they asked for. Mirrors of entire sites on subdomains they either cannot or do not want to filter/remove from the index.

Whether or not a site is useful makes no difference to me. One "version" of it in either a folder or on a subdomain is useful. Two or more versions is SPAM.

Dave

[incrediblehelp]

Originally Posted by google junky

PR6 for http://www.statelinetack.com/slt/main.jsp That is interesting.

Doing a search for tack or horse tack
The main domain is the one that actually comes up in the results.

I'll have to dig deeper on this.

No this is normal. http://www.statelinetack.com/ 301 redirects to http://www.statelinetack.com/slt/main.jsp. Lots of time Google will list the main domain in the SERPs instead of the domain being redirected to. Dont have a reason or explanation why.

[incrediblehelp]

As for the subdomain issue and its question, it seems it is just another one of Googles many vulnerabilities. As first posted on DP, then on TW, a spammer was able to get billions of subdomains into the Google index and ranking pretty well for some decent keywords. Sure Google has since been correcting this problem "by hand", but the vulnerability seems to still be there.

My feelings are if you are in the envious position to have a somewhat "white listed" or "trusted" domain like the hotels.com or statelinetack.com, abusing Google trust factor with subdomains (regardless of content being duplicated or not) seems to still work fairly easily.

Another write up on on the spammer and Google to give you more of a idea on what happen a couple of weeks ago:

Pushing Bad Data - Google's Latest Black Eye

[incrediblehelp]

More from SEW. Like I said this is pretty old news but really elaborates on the internal problems at Google.