Search engines and sub domains

[whatever]

Do search engines when indexing a website treat subdomains any differently from normal domains?
My website is http://www.whateveraustralia.com.au and I have a subdomain http://webhost.whateveraustralia.com.au

The urls are of course different, but do the search engines treat them as different sites for indexing?

[fathom]

The quick answer "Yes"

If no links between the primary site and sub-domain, the opposite would not count as internal backlinks, and if linked together -- backlinks are credited.

[ronniethedodger]

Do search engines when indexing a website treat subdomains any differently from normal domains?


My answer is that it would depend on the search engine.

In the case of Google, it is my opinion that they crawl the Internet by IP address and not by domain name. Saying that...sub-domains would be considered part of the same site if they were hosted at the same IP address, just as is sub-folders. If the sub-domain name is registered at another IP address then it would be treated as a seperate entity by Google.

My site became active last April. The IP address it is on right now, was occupied by another domain name prior to that and we had redirected it to another site. Google was indexing the new domain name one-day after it came into in existance and the new pages (and new content) were showing up in the Google results....only one problem though. The results had the old domain name on them and if you clicked on those results it took you to the site it was re-directed to. This is true, and indeed did happen. For two months I sent letters to Google asking about this and no reply, but suddenly in late July (3 mos from going online) the new domain name showed up with the results.

Indexing by IP address is further proven by another thread from a member here who questioned why his site was doing poorly at Google. The site, 6 mos. old, had very few backlinks, no PR, and not one indexed page at Google. Some members saw a PR of 2, yet I did not see any...either way, the site was failing miserably at Google.

I did a WhoIs on the site and got the IP address. After keying in the IP address in the address bar, nothing but a blank page popped up. I then did a reverse IP check on the actual address, and it revealed another 1,048 sites at the same IP address. It was part of some cheap hosting plan that resells blocks of server space all on one IP address.

Checking several of the sites at that were listed for this one IP address had shown similar results as the other site did. No PR, no cached pages at Google (some did though), and very little backlinks.

And it makes sense to index the Internet by IP rather than domain name. From a database standpoint in the real world, that is how it is done. Then they have a look-up table that uses that IP address that relates to a domain name. Google would be using there own internal DNS service in effect...and not relying on any outside DNS services.

So in my opinion, the answer for Google anyway, is that it is the base IP address that is key. The IP address cannot have more than one domain assigned to it. If the base IP address for the 1,048 sites at least had links to all of it's customer's individual domain names, instead of a blank page....they might all be better off right now. Boy that would be nice of them, eh?

Sub-domains on the same IP address, as stated in the a member's previous reply, need at least a link to point to it, externally or internally, still...just like as if it were a sub-folder.

What about AltaVista, MSN, Yahoo (Google data modified)??? Hell I don't know...can't answer that one yet. ;0)

[awall19]

Many sites share the same IP address. Google did have problems in the past where they would asses penalties on entire IP addresses, but now it views each site as its own site.

if you look at how they cluster search results it will show that google views a subdomain as being seperate than the domain (they will not cluster together)

a subdomain is different than the regular domain. the use of subfolders vs subdomains should be dependant on the goals of your site.

if you create subdomains just to manipulate search results they can check to see if tons of sites on the same c block ip address are interlinking and wipe them out for spam...you need external links too...

[ronniethedodger]

Many sites share the same IP address. Google did have problems in the past where they would asses penalties on entire IP addresses, but now it views each site as its own site.


Thank you Aaron. I am coming to that realization now.

In the case I cited above....do you think that this entire IP address (or maybe a larger block chunk) has been penalized at Google for some reason?

Take it a step further...is it possible that some of these cheap reselling hosts are notorius for harboring (harboring is too harsh a word) spammers and Google is somehow on to that?

[awall19]

I think if the goal was to operate unethically it would not be that hard to set up your own host.

I am sure that cheaper hosts may have many spammers...but so do some expensive ones.