Uptimebot

You may have noticed that SERPs are full of 3rd level domains for the last five or six month. There are a lot of questions coming to me by e-mail, which concern this subject. The majority of webmasters ask how Google defines that a domain is a free hosting and how to imitate it. Other ask why are they dropping out from SERPs, while domains, where subdomains are based on are still in SERPs.

First. There are not special definition of a free host. Any unsandboxed domain can run a lot of subdomains that will hold good positions in SERPs, untill Google spots them to be harmful and wipes them out. That is because of blogs and guestbooks spam Google is filtering out 3rd level domains. If use gray and white methods wisely, you can hold good positions and never drop out.

Concerning subdomains that have been dropped out. The problem is that in my opinion, Google is filtering such domains and their subdomains manually, by somebody’s abuse or smth. like this.
However, they see that domain is good itself - it gives free space to people that create homepages on it, or something like that. That is why they do not ban, but filter out all subdomains. They get sandboxed or lowered in SERPs.

If you have something to tell about - share your experience of managing subdomain based projects.

Filed under: Google Optimization