Case Study: Authority Domains

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Deliguy

Deliguy

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I want to do a quick case study and gather some of your guy's experience on the topic of authority domains/authority sites.

Here's the question.
Does authority domains (such as wordpress, blogger, amazon & myspace) pass authority to subpages and subdomains that have no real links on the main page nor main site? <-someone called them "orphan pages."

Subquestion:
Are there any advantages to hosting links or landing pages on authority domains that can't be accomplished on your own hosting?

You don't have to answer the question, just throw up any evidence you have seen to argue one way or the other.

Lets see what we can figure this out :Yahoo_29:
 


I'll start:

Hypothesis: It's tougher to get banned when using an authority domain.

Myspace.com VS Myspace Clone Sites
1. A large percentage of indexed profiles contain hidden text, hidden links, & CSS spam in the crappy public templates. Yet they don't get banned and still carry link weight (eg show up in the link: command).

2. I have seen banned Myspace clone sites. Although the reasons for the banning weren't specific enough to identify whether or not the spammy profiles were the exact cause it can still be assumed.

Anyone want to take on Wordpress.com vs Wordpress MultiUser?
 
Depends on how the pages were banned, for example if you're gaining a large amount of links quickly to a site with no authority it'll throw up a flag & you'll get manually reviewed.

This probably won't happen as easily with a larger authority domain like Squidoo (although I have seen plenty of Squidoo pages banned for link spamming).

Another point to take into consideration is whether the authority site uses a directory structure or a subdomain structure, since a subdomain is treated like a separate entity it may throw up flags quicker than sites that use the subdirectory structure like Myspace.
 
There was a user contributed post a while back on SeoMoz writing up the effects of successful Digg. The article was unrelated to the site, and was placed on the domain but it had no links to the main domain pages and no links coming from the domain pages.

The result of the ass load of links they got to this "orphan" article was that it lifted the domain as a whole. They saw rankings increase across the domain.

I would suspect that if an "orphan" page can lift the authority of a domain, that the opposite is true as well. It would obviously be much better if the page had links coming to it from the core pages but I suspect that it's value is greater that the value of a orphan page on a new domain by some factor of the authority of that domain.

However, I believe subdomains to be a different story. I believe that they are treated as seperate entities except in special circumstances (and most likely human intervened). I remember there being talks of Google looking to pass some primary domain value to subdomains but don't know if they ever did anything with that.

I'll see if I can find a link to that article.
 
Here is the article. As mentioned, the result was a big lift to the domain as a whole but this was only in Google, they had not see the results yet in Yahoo. I can't remember if they followed up with a later comment or post stating that they finally saw results in Yahoo. Yahoo is typically slower to react.

http://www [dot] seomoz [dot] org/blog/anatomy-of-a-super-digg
 
i found that if you get a couple of authority links when you first start a site, you can skip the whole sandbox thing. Things seemed to get going alot faster for me if I can get a couple of good links right away.
 
Deliguy said:
Here's the question.
Does authority domains (such as wordpress, blogger, amazon & myspace) pass authority to subpages and subdomains that have no real links on the main page nor main site?<-someone called them "orphan pages."
Click to expand...
I think you are confusing us with your terms or the way you refer to a subdomain as the same thing as an orphan page. Those are 2 different things.

Yes, Domain Authority will help the rank orphan pages hosted on the same domain. mysite.com/mysubpage

No, they don't help rank a subdomain with no links to it. mysubdomain.mysite.com

... but I have seen evidence of subdomains of established sites getting around the sandbox effect in Google.
 
DorianWar said:
I think you are confusing us with your terms or the way you refer to a subdomain as the same thing as an orphan page. Those are 2 different things.

Yes, Domain Authority will help the rank orphan pages hosted on the same domain. mysite.com/mysubpage

No, they don't help rank a subdomain with no links to it. mysubdomain.mysite.com

... but I have seen evidence of subdomains of established sites getting around the sandbox effect in Google.
Click to expand...

Good, Whats your evidence?

From what I gather, your hypothesis would be something like...If two authority domains, one with subpages and one with subdomains were pinned up against each other the one with subpages would outperform in measures of authority.

So whats your analysis of sites hosted on blogs.msdn.com vs blogspot.com or wordpress.com?
 
DorianWar said:
Yes, Domain Authority will help the rank orphan pages hosted on the same domain. mysite.com/mysubpage

No, they don't help rank a subdomain with no links to it. mysubdomain.mysite.com
Click to expand...

Different observation here, just one example, seen it multiple times:

Wordpress.com, subdomain name is Keyword1Keyword2.wordpress.com. Keyword1 and Keyword2 are no existing tags (=subdirectories) on wordpress.com, so I add posts on my blog using these categories/tags (always all of them to make the content on the tag pages and the blog as similar as possible)

To avoid any falsification of the results, blogroll is empty and no other already existing categories/tags are selected. Now I point links from the exact same external pages to Keyword1Keyword2.wordpress.com, http://wordpress.com/tag/Keyword1-Keyword2/ and http://wordpress.com/tag/Keyword1Keyword2/ to get them crawled, same anchor text.

In most cases, Keyword1Keyword2.wordpress.com will outrank
http://wordpress.com/tag/Keyword1-Keyword2/ and http://wordpress.com/tag/Keyword1Keyword2/ in google for a search for Keyword1 Keyword 2 as well as Keyword1Keyword2.

The only wordpress specific thing to keep in mind: They can kill your blog for a TOS violation, but they won't kill the tag/category, so you can always create a new blog and grab the traffic from the tag/category while the traffic from the deleted blog is lost forever.

The advantages compared to own hosting: For low and often even medium competitive terms, you are very likely to get a google first page result. If a new hype starts or a totally new niche is born, I want two things: Profit from it long term (own domains) AND grab this first wave of traffic (hosting on authority domains).

So, while I build my own sites that slowly gain ranks, the authority domain sites grab the traffic. It's a quick extra income on top. Sure, a #1 ranked wordpress blog with commercial background, especially adult, is gone fast once your competitors spot it...but no matter if it lasts a day or even weeks, months, it's alot of $$$ for almost no work. I had blogs on wordpress that made me net around $1k in a week. Sure, kicked, but I'm still farming the tags with new blog.

I just like the idea of diversifying, the main focus is on my own domains, but whenever I spot an opportunity, I'm all over wordpress, blogger, squidoo and other authority sites to grab my share. It's not like it takes long to fire up a site there, plug your own domains in the blogroll, add a few posts, that's it. If they last, even better, free links.
 
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On the topic of subs vs. subpages; from a strictly from a parasite and link spam blackhat perspective sub's always are easier to rank then sub-pages. I've run 100's of different parasites all with varying degree's of PR and hands down the sub-domains are easier to rank.

On a side note and something people often don't think about enough is that the sub domains get WAY better click thru's then a sub-page. I'm talking a full 20-30% more click thru's for the same rankings on something like:

paydayloans.parasite.com vs. www.parasite.com/username/paydayloans.html

So in my mind the parasite hosting that has sub's are gold. Extrapolate this out how you want to :)
 
smaxor said:
On the topic of subs vs. subpages; from a strictly from a parasite and link spam blackhat perspective sub's always are easier to rank then sub-pages. I've run 100's of different parasites all with varying degree's of PR and hands down the sub-domains are easier to rank.

On a side note and something people often don't think about enough is that the sub domains get WAY better click thru's then a sub-page. I'm talking a full 20-30% more click thru's for the same rankings on something like:

paydayloans.parasite.com vs. www.parasite.com/username/paydayloans.html

So in my mind the parasite hosting that has sub's are gold. Extrapolate this out how you want to :)
Click to expand...

Gyppo said:
Depends on how the pages were banned, for example if you're gaining a large amount of links quickly to a site with no authority it'll throw up a flag & you'll get manually reviewed.

This probably won't happen as easily with a larger authority domain like Squidoo (although I have seen plenty of Squidoo pages banned for link spamming).

Another point to take into consideration is whether the authority site uses a directory structure or a subdomain structure, since a subdomain is treated like a separate entity it may throw up flags quicker than sites that use the subdirectory structure like Myspace.
Click to expand...

i agree completely with both of these comments.

If you are coming at it from a BH angle, Subdomains would be better because they are treated as a seperate entity for internal (ahem external) linkage.
But i am getting off topic. As for our debate, i can not give any of my own proof because i havn't really thought about it.


But take a look at YTMND

Every page that a user creates, it gets it's own subdomain. Maybe not for SERP's purposes, but i can't think of any other reasons. There maybe some technical reason why they do that.
 
i had another thought when i was working, but i will keep it short.

Lets say wordpress releases a bunch of new products or does somehting crazy, and a LARGE amount of bloggers and authority domains link to wordpress.com. If your saying subdomains gain authority with no linkage, then wouldn't all wordpress hosted blogs gain a tiny bit of authority as well? Food for thought

I also had another thought, but it is like way to long to type out. I built a site for a company distributes 3M products. Since 3M has like 5 or 6 subdomains where it hosts like all its products, EX. solutions.3m.com and like products.3m.com and things along those lines. I couldn't rank higher than the 3M sub domains because there were so many of them, i ranked 7th usually for competitive terms.

But then i realized there is huge internal linkage going on there. So that doesn't really help our discussion.
 
^^^ awesome

How about authority sites that waver in the middle? Take a look at blogs.msdn.com as mentioned above. They have very few bloggers and very few daily posts by comparison with the larger blog networks, but since they roll through all the daily posts on their main page
MSDN Blogs - Blogs
and are on such a big authority domain(msdn.com) they have a HUGE saturation rate. If you deep crawl the domain and you look at the site: command. It's insane. I haven't done it recently (in at least 4 months) so i won't give a percentage figure but its safe to say its much higher than any other measurable network.

This is why trackback spamming tends to work so well on sites like blogs.mdsn.com. They also tend to have a higher pagerank per capita.
 
Something interesting...

Google 'Citizen Cope'

Theres an 'authority site' at the top (his main page). But then theres also a separate page independently indexed right there under it. Wtf? At first I thought it was ringtone spam.
 
That has been happening lately.

hahah one blog i was reading, the blogger was pissed because if you google 'rosie' or something with rosie Odonnell, like rosie blog or something, i ca't remmeber. It has been happening a lot lately. I wonder how we can score that.
 
those listings do confuse me quite a bit. I'm not sure it means the site is an authority site over all. Maybe an authority site on the subject possibly. I'm not sure
Search for 'blue hat seo'. Not an authority site yet there it is.
 
Deliguy said:
those listings do confuse me quite a bit. I'm not sure it means the site is an authority site over all. Maybe an authority site on the subject possibly. I'm not sure
Search for 'blue hat seo'. Not an authority site yet there it is.
Click to expand...

I think to make an attempt to figure out how authority works in terms of domains is nearly impossible. You have to remember that Google employs a shit ton of PhD engineers, developers and just plain brilliant idea guys to come up with different variables on how some sites are considered a higher caliber of authority than others. I'll bet that for every 5 points you sort of reverse engineer and figure out, there are 20 more sub-variable points that define that one point. It will make you and everyone else involved go mad.

But.. if you don't like to give up easily, and still want to take a shot at it, I have a theory that authority in general is measured by many concepts on what the whole PageRank algorithm was first developed to do. When PageRank actually counted and mattered, it measured a site's value in Google by how important AND popular a combined amount of pages ranked for one domain. There are also a few factors that we can carry over from PageRank to Authority, which include age of the domain, traffic, IBL's, OBL's, content, sub-pages, dir's, number of pages on the domain that are dedicated to a collective niche and are therefor relevant on a primary category level, etc. The list can go on and on. For every point mentioned, I think each one can be defined and sort of dissected into more and more sub-points/variables.

Can someone eventually come up with the answer? Yes. But the part that makes it reeeeally tough is that Google didn't go ahead and name this Authority Rank type of algorithm, and therefor they don't have to patent it either, and while someone may be at risk of using the same thing for themselves, by not patenting it, they don't have to disclose how it works or document anything on it. What does this mean? We won't ever know how it works exactly because Google will never come out and say "this is what it looks for and how and why and blah blah" like they did with PageRank.
 
sp111 said:
That has been happening lately.

hahah one blog i was reading, the blogger was pissed because if you google 'rosie' or something with rosie Odonnell, like rosie blog or something, i ca't remmeber. It has been happening a lot lately. I wonder how we can score that.
Click to expand...

That was seo speedwagon. It was just a wtf? article questioning if her sites authority was that strong. In a follow up post:

seoblog.intrapromote.com/2007/05/more_sitelinks.html

He found another site with listings like that and found that the it was due to a double 301 redirect from the sublisting's page to the #2 listing. Curiously this was switched to a single 302 redirect.

In the Citizen Cope example, the page in the sublisting is 302 redirected to the #2 listing. Looks like either redirect will do the trick.

Question is, how long would it last? Is one method better than the other?

If so I would bet on the 302 as the 301 would probably cause the second listing to be included in the sublistings in time, with both being included only temporarily due to index update latency. While the 302 would likely be hijacking a page from their own domain (think old school 302 hijacks that were so prevalent) as the hijacking filters Google put in place probably don't filter on the same domain. Both pages remain indexed for the same content. Of course, this is just speculation.
 
Deliguy said:
those listings do confuse me quite a bit. I'm not sure it means the site is an authority site over all. Maybe an authority site on the subject possibly. I'm not sure
Search for 'blue hat seo'. Not an authority site yet there it is.
Click to expand...

I can't remember where I had read it, but it was mentioned that the sublinks were based on usage data. Probably a mix of google toolbar / analytics data and whatever else they use to track the user and website relationship.

I would imagine the determining factor as to whether a site is listed with sublinks is based on some traffic and predicted user intent threshhold for the particular query.

If the site beats the mark on that algorithm for the query, google is confident enough that it would benefit the user experience to flesh the most popular pages out to the serp page. Otherwise they don't show them as they aren't confident enough that they can predict the user's intentions a high enough percentage of the time.
 
You should also consider the boost to rankings you get from having your keyword term in the subdomain name.

I know that Google has really turned up the "keyword in domain name" ranking benefits.

This might outweigh benefits of having the authority passed with subpages... depends on domain... so many possible factors here... this thread makes my head hurt.
 
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