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“What did Google do?” This has been the cry of web publishers since Google’s ‘Panda’ algorithm change in April, although when they say it, there’s usually more cursing. Google is notoriously tight-lipped with the specifics of their algorithms, but we’ve crunched some data and come to a theory: detailed domains or subdomains are much more important than they once were.
A completely hypothetical example is this: before the change, Google would see www.example.com/make-awesome-pizza and tie it strongly to a search term like “How do I make awesome pizza?” Now, the same keyword would be more likely to get make-awesome-pizza.example.com or www.make-awesome-pizza.com as a higher result.
We looked at 4,179 examples of searches across the Chitika network where the publisher had part of the query in their URL. Before the Google change, those sites were on average in spot 4.92 in Google results. After the change, 34% were showing up higher, 24% lower, and the overall average position of the same sites for the same searches was 4.53.
Now, I have to note that this is just a theory. The data suggests it to be the case, but there’s been very little time since Google’s big change, and fully analyzing the trends will require a good deal of time. Help us out a bit, if you like; have you found your site ranking higher for keywords in your subdomains? Significantly? Let us know in the comments below.
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