What If The Subdomain Was Banned? Options

[JamesHendrix]

I have a question about domains and their subdomains.

Suppose I have the domain, fruit.com. I then add two subdomains, apple and orange. Now from what I have read, the search engines will look at the domain and two subdomains as different web sites (assuming I have created the websites seperately).

I decided that the apples.fruit.com domain will use extreme black-hat se techniques, and the oranges.fruit.com will use only the purest white-hat methods.
As time goes on, the apples.fruit.com has been dropped by the search engines. Could this affect the top-level domain and other subdomain names?

The reason I am asking is I have been thinking about getting a domain just for this test and to see what the long term effects are, but would like some other people's input.

Thanks
James

[Shane]

I could just as easily believe that it would effect the main domain as I could believe that it wouldn't...but ultimately I'd be too afraid that it would to mess around on one of the subdomains.

[rohgan03]

I am not sure technically what is the correct answer but my gut says the SEs will be able to figure out that the subdomain and main domain are related ...I am sure they have a trust factor rating that is used in ranking....and that would drop

[Randy]

I've never seen it tested James, but can see that it could go either way.

I do however think that the chances of the main domain and all sub's getting roasted and toasted would likely go up considerably if they linked to each other. That would certainly exhibit a connection between them all, as much or more than being a sub would in fact.

Think of it like this...

There are some merchant account providers out there who have their customers link over to a sub-domain. So links to the cart would go from www.vendor.com to vendor.merchant.com.

There are possibly thousands of those "vendor" sub-domains.

If one of them was doing something black hat enough to get in trouble would it make sense to assume that every other vendor was involved in the same sort of thing? No it wouldn't. And since none of the other vendors linked to the black hat vendor, one would logically assume they should be safe from penalty.

Dunno if that's the way they look at it or not, but it's one example of why the main domain and other subs might escape penalty if there were no other relationship between them.

[robmarketshare]

>>[SIZE=14] I am testing my signature

supose you are metric

[Randy]

(IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/offtopic.gif)

Rohgan is just trying to get Jill's ire up. (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

I quote from #8 in the [url=http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?act=boardrules]Forum Rules[/url] pertaining to signatures:

You may not adjust the font or size of your signature.

[rohgan03]

Sorry guys...will go and fix the signature thing right away. In the process of launching a forum, so was testing how signature works. It seems Invision has this option switched off by default.

[Jill]

Could this affect the top-level domain and other subdomain names?

It's impossible to know unless you actually test it, but my thinking would be that it would depend on how or if you linked the domains together. If they were completely independent with no links from one to the other, I think they would be treated completely separately, and if one were to get penalized it wouldn't effect the others.

Look at something like geocities. There have to be tons of spam sites there, but that doesn't stop the decent sites from doing okay with the engines.

[JamesHendrix]

well, I am going to get a throw-away domain name and try this. I am curious what the results will be. I will have to give the linking issue some thought.

I found a site that I think I can get some good black-hat techniques. Take a look at
[site removed] and notice the nice PR6, but the lack of content (or too much if you see the techniques). Makes you wonder how close Google uses their rules on web sites.

This post has been edited by Jill: Jun 25 2005, 12:21 AM

[Jill]

James, you can try it, but it could take years (or never) before you ever get banned.

[dejaone]

no need to try or test. Believe me. If Google doesn't like one or a few pages of a site. It'll remove the entire domain and sub-domains from the index. Don't know about Yahoo and MSN.

[Jill]

It'll remove the entire domain and sub-domains from the index.

Have you experienced this personally?

I find it hard to believe they would remove completely distinct sites just because they are a subdomain. It they're linking together, ok, but if they have nothing to do with one another than I would have to assume they wouldn't. But since I have no experience with this, I can't say for sure of course.

[ILoveJackDaniels]

One of my SEO clients has had a subdomain penalised (before I worked with them), and it is nowhere to be found in the Google SERPs despite thousands of backlinks. Their main domain is, however, unaffected and enjoys good rankings in some competitive areas. A penalty of any sort would have caused serious damage to those rankings yet when the subdomain was shot down there was virtually no change to the primary domain (in fact, less of a change than I would have expected as a result of the loss of links from the subdomain).

Looking at this from a search engine's point of view, what benefit would there be in conferring a penalty from one subdomain on the entire domain? Their own property, blogger.com, lists most blogs as http://subdomain.blogger.com - each a different site. The primary use of a subdomain is to host a separate site.

[Scottie]

Good point, Dave. Think of all the free hosting services out there that use a subdomain for their clients.

[toddieg]

this is a good question.

i've had cases of subdomains being banned where the top level domain gets banned also.. (of course they were crosslinked, so that might have been the case)

i recently just got a few sites banned from a free host that gives you a subdomain. both the domains got banned during different times, and nothing happened to the top level domain.. (goes in theory with what jill said - some sort of trust issue w/the top level domain - perhaps they knew it was a free host)