[NOTE – This is a slightly older post that was moved over from another blog of ours. It’s still very relevant and valuable though and subdomains haven’t changed very much. So the SEO aspect of this post is worthwhile, which is why we figured we’d post it here on WebCore Internet Solutions!]
So the new John Carter movie is coming out today and a friend asked me to see it. I wasn’t overly hyped about it – mostly because of the crappy versions of it made so far. So I searched for the trailer and found something really interesting – other than how good the trailer looks!
I searched for “John Carter trailer”. The first result was Apple’s trailer page, an interesting fact itself in that Apple has that much pull/SEO juice to be listed first for a movie trailer. (Side note: Apple is also 1st in Google for the term “movie trailer”.)
But what made me more curious was the 2nd result. It was from a blogspot site, http://john-carter-movie-trailer.blogspot.com/.
Pretty crazy! I didn’t think that individual blogspot subdomains could rank that well. I wondered why that was and did some sleuthing.
I went to Open Site Explorer and plugged in the URL. (Open Site Explorer is a tool that shows many of the backlinks for a site.) Surprisingly this John Carter blog only has about 20 linking root domains and 171 links overall. However, the domain authority (DA) of the site is a 96 – not surprising because that’s Blogspots overall DA. The page authority (PA) is 44 – a very healthy number and surprising because of the low number of backlinks.
The backlinks themselves don’t carry a very high DA either for the most part. There’s a 60 and a couple 50s, but most are 30 or below. Still, these backlinks are nothing to sneeze at despite being little more than spam sites targeted towards keywords for other movies.
For instance, one of them is http://red-riding-hood.movie-trailer.com/. If you go to the link you’ll see something VERY similar to the John Carter blogspot page. It appears to be a spammy site with Adsense on it. It too is a subdomain of movie-trailer.com and maintains a high PA of 52.
What’s the moral of the story here? Well, maybe subdomains that are part of a domain with a high DA are given more relevance by Google. If nothing else, it seems that they’re not discounted or looked down upon.
It might be less work to set up a domain like awesomefruits.com and then you could more easily rank for something like bananas.awesomefruits.com. You could set up a WordPress or Drupal multisite install and go to town, quickly creating the subdomains you want.
It’s very, very interesting. Ultimately, we think you should just use the main domain if you have a choice, at least if it’s for your main business. But for a side project or parallel business you might want to think about using a sudomain.
But each instance is going to be very different and will require some research as it depends on the niche/industry. If you have any questions about it, contact us today!
