Although Google PR may not be the holy grail for webmasters, it’s still something that people use as a barometer. It may not be the only one, but it is still indicative of a site’s overall “importance”.
While browsing a couple of the sites I manage this evening I noticed something quite odd. Sub-domains seemed to share the PR of the main site, so the Blacknight blog has the same PR as the main Blacknight site, while the search.ie forum shares the pr of the main site
Has anyone else noticed this?
Michele Neylon :: Pensieri
Technology, Marketing, Domains, Thoughts
It does sometimes happen, but it’s by no means automatic; PR for different pages within a site can actually differ significantly, even.
Rob
I know what you mean. I should have been more explicit. What I’m seeing is the main page of the primary site and the main page of the sub-domain have the same PR, whereas individual pages are doing their usual thing (or not, as the case may be)
I think this also depends on the content of the sub domain. For example if you have a Meta refresh on the sub domain google seems to flag the PR differently. In theory this would be for sites like cjb.net where you can get a free sub domain.
If the sub domain is linked heavily on the main domain this may give the illusion of PR being “shared”. In my opinion, the Google PR algorithm can work out if the sub domain is associated with the main domain using the above method.
Just a side note, MSN seems to handle sub domains a lot differently. I have seen a lot of sub domain spam cropping up on msn. By spam I mean sites inserting keywords into the sub domain EG: web-hosting-domains-spam.somespamyurl.com. A lot have blogs have also adopted this method.
Jason
The sub-domain spam is a serious issue and if MSN aren’t taking that into account it will be picked up on by the webmaster / seo community
Not entirely…
Here’s an interesting scenario…
http://www.kenmc.com – Page Rank 2
photo.kenmc.com – Page Rank 3
my.kenmc.com – Page Rank 4!!
Explain to me that if you will!
Ken
Can I just shrug emphatically? 🙂
if you like! doesn’t explain how in the name of god my personal blog, which gets very little activity pulls that sort of PR! Guess I should start giving it some more attention so!
If it was true then a new site would be better using newsite.hostingcompany.ie instead of its own newsite.com, but it doesn’t seem to be true, except for http://www.hostingcompany.ie and hostingcompany.ie being the same, which is probably a delibrate exception, so time for the trendy load distrubutors to stop using w3.hostingcompany.ie
It seems your domain IS linked heavily on your main site.
Other factors could include higher PR links to your “my.” sub domain. Its about the quality of links not the quantity. However I could only find 7 results for the “my.” sub domain. One good link could brink your site up by 2 pr. I have done this for new sites in the past. 😛
As a blog seems to be involved I would suspect 301 redirects somewhere in the equation. I have been playing around with these for some time. If you are using them they may be passing PR. I have seen a case of a pr 2 page jumping to pr 4 with no inbound linkage.
Google seems to have problems with sub-domains lately and especially sub-sub-domains as the 5 billion pages fiasco revealed. I noticed the same on my site before the latest PR update, http://www.free-ringtones.ie was PR 4 and wap.free-ringtones.ie was PR 6! Didnt know how that happened. There was practically no links to wap.free-ringtones.ie
But now its back to PR3