To Subdomains to Optimize for Google — HubPages Switches

Google Panda update forces HubPages to transition user content to subdomains.

Web community HubPages is making a drastic change to its URL structure in an effort to recover from Google’s Panda update.

The site’s content is created by members who share in advertising revenue. Like many similar sites, it was hit hard by Google’s update targeted at so-called “content farms”.

The site will now provide a subdomain (third level domain) to each member, such as username.hubpages.com. The transition to subdomains will start August 10.

The firm explains that this “ought to allow each author to be judged by Google separately”.

That also means they won’t get as much “juice” from being on the main HubPages.com URL. Also, all the links to existing pages on the site will need to be forwarded. But this seems like a necessary move in response to Google’s algorithm changes. Still, Google will penalize a domain’s entire inventory of subdomains in the event a sizable portion of them are abused.

HubPages has been testing the changes and found that many users saw their traffic recover with a move to subdomains.