45 days ago I wrote that Google is going to be cracking down on sites that lease out its own subdomains and subfolders so that other companies can rank their content better on leased domains. Google now officially posted on Twitter about the topic.
Google said "We’ve been asked if third-parties can host content in subdomains or subfolders of another’s domain. It’s not against our guidelines. But as the practice has grown, our systems are being improved to better know when such content is independent of the main site & treat accordingly. Overall, we'd recommend against letting others use subdomains or subfolders with content presented as if it is part of the main site, without close supervision or the involvement of the primary site. Our guidance is if you want the best success with Search, provide value-added content from your own efforts that reflect your own brand."
Here are the tweets:
We’ve been asked if third-parties can host content in subdomains or subfolders of another’s domain. It’s not against our guidelines. But as the practice has grown, our systems are being improved to better know when such content is independent of the main site & treat accordingly.
— Google Webmasters (@googlewmc) August 14, 2019
Our guidance is if you want the best success with Search, provide value-added content from your own efforts that reflect your own brand.
— Google Webmasters (@googlewmc) August 14, 2019
Again, this should come to no surprise to anyone reading this site, since we covered this 1.5 months ago.
So we have Google saying this is not against Google's guidelines directly but it is becoming a problem and some seem to be abusing it. You can expect Google to not rank these pages as well, when Google can determine that these subdomains or subfolders are from third-party organizations.
You can see our previous coverage of this topic over here.
Forum at Twitter.
