I reported over at Search Engine Watch blog that the Google Sub Sub Domain Issues Clearly Visible, meaning the issue with the 5 billion pages indexed at Google was most likely because of how Google handles sub sub domains. Well, that may not be true. I wanted to offer up another explanation, this time from Cre8asite Forums.
Ron Carnell, Cre8asite Forum Admin, wrote up his explanation of what he believes the issue may be. I'll quote;
Whether the issue is subdomains or sub-subdomains isn't relevant, in my opinion. The real issue is whether either should be considered independent entities. Should barry.tripod.com be lumped in the same barrel with ron.tripod.com, even though they ostensibly have very different content compiled by entirely different people? Should poetry.about.com be considered apart from pediatrics.about.com in spite of being managed by the same parent company?
Ron explains that the search engines "historically" views sub domains, and sub sub domains as "as separate entities from their parent domain." Ron believes that Google's clustering algorithms have been fined tunes just a bit too much, causing a site like this to appear less or more as one site. The "relationships between sites" is what is determined here and by Google's mission to thwart all spam, it may have gone too far?
Ron's post makes an interesting read. I personally did not mean to associate sub sub domains, i.e. the keywords in the domain as the issue. Because, we know that Google doesn't put too much weight towards keywords in the URL. It was first hypothesized that the issue with sub sub domains was that Google treated them too much as individual entities, and that can be used to ones advantage.
Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.