I managed to take the number 5 spot in traffic this month up from my previous number 6 spot.
Unfortunately, I except to see my traffic fall next month because I redirected all my subdomains after 3 years of use. Here is what I wrote in reply to Robbie’s comment:
Timely question Robbie,
As of last night RentVine does not use subdomains any longer. I made that change right after I got back from the conference.I got to talk to some Google engineers about this issue and finally made the hard decision to redirect my subdomain pages. I believe I will see a hit in traffic in about 2 weeks from both Google and Yahoo.
One of the Google engineers I talked to (at Matt Cutts level) said to avoid multiple doorway pages created just for Google or creating subdomains for only one page. I told him that a lot of sites in my industry use this approach and he asked me for a list of sites that did this, but I decided not to until I clean up my site first.
The list of subdomain users in this industry is long:
- RentalHomesPlus.com (I saw the Cars.com SEO at the conference)
- Apartments.com
- Sublet.com
- House.info (excessive subdomain spam!)
- ApartmentGuide.com
- CityLeases.com
- Tenant.com
and many more.
Sounds like the subdomain power-play is coming to an end.
I have decided to go the safe route, rather than getting hit with a penalty or filter in the future.
Robbie in your list above I am pretty sure RentalHouses.com is not doing this - however they are buying links from sites like usacitiesonline.com which might get them thrown in the Google jail one of these days.
Even though I know I am going to get hit with less traffic in a few weeks it actually feels good to be totally spam free now.
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7 users responded in this post
Dave,
You are a very good seo guy. I am sure you have already made a plan to get around the sub domain delima
I don’t anticipate you will fall for long. just a matter of time before the S.E. cache a new structure for rentvine.
BTW….Who ever thought you would see homerentalads and rentclicks way down at the bottom of the traffic list??
Have a great weekend! go Jaguars!
Robbie
Thanks for saying that, lets hope I don’t fall too far.
Seems to me that buying keywords on google will become more important so supplement lost links. Google needs that revenue!
How accurate do you think Compete.com is? How close does it get to what Google analytics tells you about your traffic?
I base it off my unique visits and sometimes it matches up pretty well. This summer is was matching well but in the winter months it does not.
Perhaps when I am kicking rentals.com’s @ss in the future I will do what you do Jeremy and QuantCast it.
[...] will be little or no acquisitions in 2008. None of the sites in the housing rental space I track will be bought buy large [...]
[...] thought when I got rid of the subdomains that Yahoo would not like me as much and I was going to take a big hit in traffic, but actually my [...]