

Google Says "Let a Trillion Subdomains Bloom" - WillyF
http://www.seobook.com/subdomains-google-panda

======
chime
I'm not a big proponent of advanced SEO and mostly stick to doing the right
things (proper page title, good content, easy to read/type links, use of H1,
H2 etc.) I don't make 100 landing pages or optimize my apps/sites for SEO by
using all possible synonyms for my keywords. I don't do these things because
they do not make my content better or improve usability but simply try to
increase search engine rankings.

> You follow best practices. You get torched for it. You are deciding how many
> employees to fire & if you should simply file bankruptcy and be done with
> it.

Anytime I read any SEO complaints against Google, I notice this huge sense of
entitlement that the authors and commenters have, as if Google owes them
something with respect to search engine rankings just because they might be
paying for AdWords or some other Google service. You have the full right to
complain if your ad campaigns do not work as advertised. But it's your own
fault if you have to fire employees because Google changed their primary
search algorithm which tanked your traffic. Sorry. Google does not owe you
anything even if their statements are contradictory.

> And the truth is, this sort of shift is common, because as soon as Google
> openly recommends something people take it to the Nth degree & find ways to
> exploit it, which forces Google to change.

The author hits the nail on the head right here and even suggests the proper
method:

> The only ways to get clarity from Google on issues of importance are to: *
> ignore what Google suggests & test what actually works

Don't try to read too much into how Google works from a comment by an employee
here or an official blog post there. Just do what your site needs to function
properly and most importantly offer something that people want.

~~~
jshen
"But it's your own fault if you have to fire employees because Google changed
their primary search algorithm which tanked your traffic. "

I used to work for an ecommerce site. Over 60% of our traffic and sales came
from google. To handle those orders we hired people, then if we lost ranking
in google we would have to fire them. How would that have been our fault?

~~~
chime
> Over 60% of our traffic and sales came from google.

Because you did not diversify strongly enough. Certainly, Google is a great
way to get lots of traffic but if 60% of your sales comes from a single source
with whom you do not have a signed contract, it is your own fault if you
cannot handle your business when the sales tank. It is no different than
putting 60% of your investments in a single stock and seeing the company fail,
wiping out 60% of your savings. Sure, you didn't cause the company to fail but
you did plan very poorly. People keep blaming Google when this happens. But
who told you to rely on Google for 60% of your sales, especially when you
haven't paid them or signed anything with them with respect to search engine
rankings?

Please note that my reply is directed more to the owners of the ecom site than
you personally.

~~~
jshen
I think you missed my point. We can handle our business when google drops us,
but the volume from google is large enough that it required hiring more
people. If that goes away, we'd fire those people.

I agree with your larger point, but let's be honest, when people are shopping
for things online they usually type it into a search engine (if they don't go
to amazon directly). Depending on the type of product you are selling you may
not be able to get around this.

~~~
aaronwall
A lot of the biggest brands see more "search" referrals that are just their
brand name going through search engines.

As web browsers replace address bars with search boxes the search engines in a
very real sense act like a utility the redirects the traffic flow through a
page with ads on it. If you rank fine then no big deal, but if you don't show
up for your own brand then that is brutal.

Of course most the sites hit by Panda were not hit so hard that they don't
show up for their site name (unless their site was named after a generic
commercial keyword where there were lots of other competitors already) but in
the cases where it was a lot of those businesses were just hosed. It is yet
another way to boost big brands...not only put weight on brand related
signals, but make the generics more likely to get clipped by the algorithm at
some point.

That forces non-brands to build brand assets & re-enforce them display ads and
such. Google is even buying a ton of display ads that advertise display ads.
And a lot of those ads highlight how display ads have increased branded search
queries for the brands that are buying them.

------
robtoo
_Matt Cutts wrote to Edmondson that he might want to try subdomains, among
other things._

Matt Cutts isn't claiming here that subdomains are better than subdirectories,
just that they are treated differently (which should come as no great surprise
-- "different things are treated differently" isn't exactly a shock.)

Suggesting to someone that they try something different when their first
approach doesn't seem to be working out is hardly revolutionary or headline-
worthy.

But somehow this short quote manages to get a whole blog post hung on it, with
the eventual conclusion that "the average webmaster is told to "sit and
spin"".

The author took the lazy way out, appealing to emotion and outrage, rather
than actually doing the experiments to see how google differentiates between
subdomains and subdirectories.

Also: _All we know is that it has been close to a half-year since Panda has
been implemented, and in spite of massive capital investments virtually nobody
has recovered._

Well, of course.

Panda was aiming to lower the rankings of certain kinds of content-suppliers.
These sites weren't supposed to be able to just make a few changes and
recover; they were supposed to be permanently affected.

Panda wasn't an assault course that Google built just so that a few webmasters
could test their skillz.

~~~
aaronwall
"The author took the lazy way out, appealing to emotion and outrage, rather
than actually doing the experiments to see how google differentiates between
subdomains and subdirectories."

That presumes that the algorithm behaves consistently across sites & that the
author of the article has dozens of sites that were hit by Panda to do a
variety of scientific subdomain tests on it.

Of course, neither of which are actually true.

------
redthrowaway
I'm not feeling a whole lot of sympathy for the SEO crowd that caused the spam
clusterfuck in the first place. Search results are better. That's all I care
about. If your huffpo/associated content clone isn't ranking first anymore,
cry me a river. When I google something it means I'm looking for an
_informative site_ on the subject, not your useless crapfest.

Furthermore, this is now a few SEO articles I've seen hit the frontpage today
with very few people in the comments seeming to like the article. Considering
HN has a very respectable pagerank of 6 and doesn't use nofollow tags, could
it be that we're getting spammed for backlink juice?

~~~
crockstar
For backlink juice almost certainly not as the links don't stick around very
long. For traffic on the other hand? That's a more likely possibility.

------
yaakov34
What actual search results became worse _for users_ as a result of these
changes? Anyone got examples?

If this is a matter of certain SEO-reliant websites being sent to the back of
the line and not being able to figure out how to cut in front of everyone else
again, well, _good_.

And the Google index is still plenty spammy, as we discussed just recently on
HN. There was also an article about lead generation sites crowding out genuine
local businesses for searches like "locksmith emergency portland". Google
needs to be trying more changes, not less.

EDIT: oh, read some replies down the thread and feel the love for the SEO
guys. I get it - heavy SEO and outright search engine spam at this point is
more annoying than email spam ever was.

Here is a message for the SEOers: "Nobody wants to hear you complain. Nobody
cares. Nobody sympathizes." I say we google-bomb that and make it the first
result for "SEO". [That was a _joke_.]

~~~
aaronwall
AT&T made the same argument with their network as well. And the problem was
that you couldn't see all the hidden costs baked into that _while it was
happening_.

You could only see those sorts of hidden costs after the fact, when waves of
innovation appeared quickly out of nowhere. Held back for decades, a half-
century of innovation appeared in little more than a decade.

How do you calculate the cost of that? In Tim Wu's book titled The Master
Switch [http://www.amazon.com/Master-Switch-Information-Empires-
Borz...](http://www.amazon.com/Master-Switch-Information-Empires-
Borzoi/dp/0307269930) he highlighted that AT&T example & asked a person to
imagine some company deciding to hold back email for 10 years & trying to
guess the incalculable astronomical costs.

Now, to be fair, I wouldn't say Google is anywhere near as anti-competitive as
AT&T has been historically, but they have certainly grown more adversarial
over the past 3 or 4 years. Compete.com shows over 5% of Google's downstream
traffic going to Youtube & that traffic flow was up 18% in a single
month...after lots of other user generated content sites got whacked. Think
Youtube is different & better than the others? In some ways it may be, but if
you read the comments below the video they are about as low quality as they
come anywhere across the web. Something like 30% of Youtube pages have
"Bieber" in them.

site:youtube.com search on Google = About 621,000,000 results

site:youtube.com bieber search on Google = About 203,000,000 results

The other big issue (at least inside the United States) is the large companies
are not hiring that many people domestically...so most of the job grow _must_
come from small businesses.

A lot of the companies that were wiped off the search results were not "evil
SEO spammers" of some sort, but rather small ecommerce shops & such. The
drastic shifts in business do increase risks (perceived & real). How much
innovation & economic prosperity that destroys isn't something that is easy to
calculate.

I am doing better now than I was before Panda, however a lot of people who are
not SEO experts who run small businesses just lost their business. As search
keeps raising the bar on the number of steps required to be good enough to be
in the game a lot of small businesses get torched, because who has time to
know their craft & jump through 30 hoops for Google? Of course that is no big
deal to the SEO pro who focuses on SEO...but to the small business who has to
do everything from accounting to taking out the trash such a large shift in
traffic & increase in complexity in search is devastating.

And, if we go back to why the update was even needed, it was primarily driven
by Google funding MFA content farms/factories like Demand Media's eHow &
"answer" scrapers like Ask.com.

I can show you one HUGE example of the search results looking nastier...check
out some of Google's product search integration in the search results.

I just searched Google for "necklaces" and the products they showed cost $60,
$8, $19, & $5. They are not widely representative of the diversity of the
category, look ugly, and are generally of far lower utility than the affiliate
sites & smaller specialty ecommerce sites that got torched & are now
considered spam by "the algorithm".

There are also cases where some original content creators had their sites
whacked, whereas the file hosting warez sites violating their copyright
outrank the original source. Search can't create a much more damaging
ecosystem then penalizing the creative sources & directly funding their
parasites.

A parting thought here...we are generally the most unique where we are the
most refined & we are generally the most alike in how we are vulgar.

As the web moves from specialty shops to big box stores (aka: big brands) a
lot of that diversity & beauty becomes less accessible. Google is/was one of
the few counter-weights to the big business walled garden interests online. As
they place more weight on branding, they ultimately act much more like that
they were trying to differentiate themselves from.

What is the long-term cost of less diversity & less economic specialization?
That is how one needs to frame the above "what actual search results became
worse for users as a result of these changes" question.

We are in the middle of a trend rather than at the end of it, so the answer is
currently unknown.

------
WillyF
I submitted this because I'm a "victim" of Panda, and this article did a good
job of explaining the frustration I'm dealing with.

A lot of the commenters seem to feel that Google doesn't owe webmasters
anything. I disagree. Every time a SERPs page shows up with my site in the
results, Google is selling advertising on top of my content. I gave them
permission to use snippets of my content in return for sending whatever
traffic they think should be sent my way. It's a mutually beneficial
relationship (though they definitely hold most of the power), but it's
certainly not a gift. We can both pull out of the deal at any time, but
there's no reason to since we're both profiting from it.

I run sites to help college students find jobs and internships. One is called
One Day, One Job and the other is One Day, One Internship. Every day I write
about a new company. It's usually 400-600 words and I talk about what the
company does, who they are, why they're interesting, and what kind of entry
level jobs or internships they have. I get thank you notes from readers every
day. I've helped put dozens of people into jobs they never would have found
without my help. I get a ton of praise from college career services offices.
There's certainly a consensus that my content is extremely high quality,
useful, and something that Google would want searchers to find.

I've made SEO an important part of my strategy. I've optimized my pages,
reworked my site architecture, and built a ton of high quality links. I've
also done a lot of keyword research to try and better understand the
psychology of a job seeker whose main tool for finding jobs is the Internet.
I've tried a lot of other marketing techniques. I keep coming back to SEO.
It's the absolute best way to reach job seekers. I've always followed Google's
rules as closely as possible. I keep up with what Matt Cutts is saying and
what Google is posting on their Webmaster Central blog. I'm not trying to game
the search engines, I'm just trying to make the most of the opportunity that
they offer to expand the reach of my content.

One Day, One Job got hit by Panda on February 24th. One Day, One Internship
was never hit. Because the sites are nearly identical (including a lot of
posts that are 90-95% shared content), it seemed weird that one would get hit
and the other wouldn't. I figured out quickly that it had to be some sort of
duplicate content issue. For a long time Google has said that duplicate
content was not something that would be penalized--they'd just filter out
anything that looks to be a duplicate. I found that One Day, One Job would
rank for job related queries, and One Day, One Internship would rank for
internship related queries. Rarely would they both show up on the first page
for a given search term.

The reason that I built two separate sites was that I thought it was the best
choice for my users. Job seekers and internship seekers are looking for
slightly different things, so why not build separate sites and e-mail lists
for them. I'm not trying to manipulate anything. I'm just trying to serve two
mostly separate audiences with very similar content. Google assured me this
wasn't a problem--and if it was they'd just show the user the most relevant
result.

Google messed up with Panda. Even though One Day, One Job always gets the
content first, has more and stronger incoming links, and has been around
longer than One Day, One Internship, it got the penalty. One Day, One
Internship is not the canonical source, but Google thinks it is.

So far I've been unable to fix this. I tried linking all duplicated posts on
One Day, One Internship to the corresponding post on One Day, One Job to tell
Google that it was the original source. I gave this over a month to set in,
yet saw no results. Now I've used rel="canonical" to give Google a strong
signal that One Day, One Job posts should be seen as canonical. It killed my
One Day, One Internship traffic, and One Day, One Job has not seen any benefit
yet. I'm waiting to see if it will eventually start working, but I'm not very
hopeful.

My next step may be combining the two sites. I'd prefer not to, but it might
make the most sense. I probably should have built the two as one site from the
start, but I liked the idea of having two separate, but connected brands. That
decisions shouldn't matter as much as it does now.

I strongly believe that Google's search results are worse without my content
ranking as well as it used to. Obviously I'm biased, but I think most of my
site's users would agree. My traffic on One Day, One Job is down 30-40% from
where it was, and I've generated thousands of dollars less in revenue than I
would have without the Panda penalty.

I don't doubt that Panda had an overall positive effect on the search
ecosystem, but it really sucks for those who have worked hard to play by
Google's rules. The repeated contradictions have caused me to follow paths
that I may not have otherwise chosen.

Traffic from Google is extremely valuable to me. I'm willing to bend over
backward to get it, but how do I do that when they are completely unclear
about what they want (or even worse when they're very clear about what they
want and then they change their mind)? I've been through their "guidance on
building high quality sites" (see here:
[http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-
guid...](http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-
building-high-quality.html)). I know that I've built an extremely high quality
site. Panda was a huge setback for my business. 5 months later I still haven't
recovered, though I've tried a number of things that one would think would
work. What do I do? I can't give up on Google. It's too important.

~~~
richardg
I suspect I got hit by Panda too... we should know what are the basis for
their classification or else, we're all in the dark. Asked here in HN but
nobody answered so I'm guessing. The only clue I have is that after the "Panda
hit" I'm on the 4th/5th page on the results on Google but still on top on Bing
and Yahoo..

~~~
aaronwall
look in your web analytics. the dates that a lot of people saw sharp traffic
declines are:

    
    
        Panda Update 1.0: Feb. 24, 2011
        Panda Update 2.0: April 11, 2011 (about 7 weeks later)
        Panda Update 2.1: May 10, 2011 (about  4 weeks later)
        Panda Update 2.2: June 16, 2011 (about 5 weeks later)
    

source: [http://searchengineland.com/why-google-panda-is-more-a-
ranki...](http://searchengineland.com/why-google-panda-is-more-a-ranking-
factor-than-algorithm-update-82564)

~~~
richardg
My surge started on May 19 and it abruptly ended, actually plummeted last July
8. I still got first page results in Bing and Yahoo..

------
rkalla
Did anyone else read a lot of anger/frustation in this piece?

From Matt's quote, I just got the impression that sub-domains are an option
and that GBot treats them as logically cohesive groupings of information, I
didn't see anywhere that he said subdirectories were suddenly bad.

Then the author went on about best practices and getting burned for them --
he'd know better than I would if that has been true over the longer term -- I
just didn't interpret Matt's comment to imply all that.

Some people must have benefited from Panda... I still find plenty of junk in
my search results, but it makes me sick to think that if they hadn't rolled it
out how impossible it would be to find good content at all.

I wonder what the logical conclusion of search engines/SEO and all this jazz
will be in 10 years. If history is any indicator, we'll all swing back to some
AOL-esque, walled garden, ad-driven existence where "Search" means nothing
more than "find applicable ads"... I suppose that is somewhat true now.

~~~
aaronwall
'Some people must have benefited from Panda'

Largely 2 groups of sites did \- big brands & big media sites / sites with
plenty of "brand" signal \- smallish sites that were too small to get clipped
when a lot of the larger (but not BIG BRAND large) sites in their vertical got
hit.

'I wonder what the logical conclusion of search engines/SEO and all this jazz
will be in 10 years. If history is any indicator, we'll all swing back to some
AOL-esque, walled garden, ad-driven existence where "Search" means nothing
more than "find applicable ads"... I suppose that is somewhat true now.'

That is a great point...and in Tim Wu's book I mentioned above, he highlighted
how this was the big fundamental strategic difference between Google & Apple.

The answer to how it all turns out is still a bit unknown.

------
blankslate
The author's based his career around the ability to pervert search results -
and apparently he's frustrated because this fucks up the results for everybody
so badly that Google have to change their algorithm.

Sympathy? Not really. I hope he stubs his toe so hard they have to amputate
his foot.

~~~
aaronwall
And I hope you stub your typing finger so bad they have to amputate both of
your arms. :D

You sound much more clever than you are. Or was that backwards?

------
william42
Sorry, not feeling much sympathy for SEO types. Their purpose is directly
opposite that of the average web user.

~~~
tomjen3
Yeah they are like marketeers -- a little may be necessary (Oh, our entire
site shouldn't be in flash?) but more than that and you end up in a war of
attrition.

------
jshen
Maybe this will force companies to build an audience with more legit methods
like word of mouth.

~~~
aaronwall
The big content farming companies understand that they have to stuff the
"brand" ballot box. Which is why Demand Media is doing all sorts of stuff with
promotional sponsors & Aol is closing down many of their niche sites at the
same time they are adding a celebrities section to the Huffington Post.
Huffington has a green light to spam with authority after the Panda update.

------
awaz
Yeah, let the trillion sub-domains bloom for this season. The next animal that
will come around (panda?) will then decide their fate.

------
Uchikoma
I wonder if I can create a trillion on my own and if that would help.

~~~
baddox
If your subdomains consist of letters and numbers, there are over a trillion
possible 8-character subdomains.

------
MostAwesomeDude
God forbid people actually put useful content on their sites instead. :T

~~~
aaronwall
This presumes that the stuff that is ranking higher is more useful than the
stuff that disappeared. That, unfortunately, is not always the case. A couple
counter examples:

<http://www.seobook.com/huffington-post> <http://www.seobook.com/doorway-
pages-ranking-google-2011>

------
jackpirate
Right now, it is much easier to create directories in a script. You can't
exactly do that with subdomains yet because they are hosted on DNS servers
separate from the http server. That makes subdomain structure intrinsically
much more valuable - it's guaranteed to be created by a human.

Maybe the nextgen frameworks will incorporate an easy way to create subdomains
via a script?

~~~
chime
Nah, subdomains aren't any different from directories. You can easily setup
wildcard subdomains and all of them run off the same code base. I can easily
have username.mysite.com show the user's profile the moment a user signs up.
No changes to any servers needed.

