According to Google’s software engineer, Matt Cutts – Google plans to shortly roll out a new filter that will treat sub-folders and sub-domains of a site equally. According to SE Roundtable (http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/015621.html), at a recent PubCon conference in Las Vegas, Matt stated that very soon things will change and a domain will be limited to 2 total URL’s within any set of search results.

So what does this mean for webmasters? Since sub-domains up until this point have been treated as individual domains, site owners had the ability to easily game the system and index an endless amount of sub-domains in Google to dominate a bunch of rankings. Google’s latest effort to put an end to this, will most likely have a significant impact on websites using these tactics. In addition though, some legit sites are likely to hurt from this change, as certain sites who let’s say had 3-4 of their own listings within top 10 search results will now be limited to just 2, therefore losing some of the traffic.

Whether or not this new algorithm will cause relevancy issues is under question, but the filter should surely put an end to black hat SEO’s taking advantage of the current situation, especially those in the more competitive areas of the business.

Labels: google, search engine optimization, SEO, sub-domains