Today, the Wall Street Journal released an article covering Hubpages, a site which found that using subdomains as an alternate to pages is a method for publishers to increase their Google traffic. Hubpages indicated that by moving content from a number of pages associated with an individual domain to a variety of subdomains allows publishers to repair some of the damage done to their page rank by Google’s Panda update.
This information is an agreement with this February 28th study by Chitika Insights detailing the impact keywords had when appearing in the domain name or the subdomain versus unique pages. The study noted that 34% of publishers who included keywords in their domain or subdomain saw an increase in Google traffic.
The standard deviation of publishers’ page rank also improved significantly (from 10.4 to 4.8) if the keyword was included in the domain or subdomain. This indicates that publishers, who included or made the keyword change after Panda, were now ranking on the first page in Google search results. Additionally, the same publishers saw an overall increase in their page rank position from 4.93 to 4.54.
Publishers who have noticed a significant drop in their stats following the Panda update should consider testing whether a shift towards the use of subdomains supports the regaining of lost traffic. As a data company in the business of serving ads, it is Chitika’s goal to help our publishers monetize their traffic in the best way possible. If you are interested in learning more, check out Chitika Insight’s complete report.
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