Will Google Crack Down On Sites Leasing Out Its Subdomains

Google’s John Mueller addressed the topic of sites leasing or renting out subdomains off of their main domain and letting third-parties put their content on those subdomains in an effort to rank better in Google and sell more. John didn’t call it spam but did say the search leads at Google are aware of this and have been in discussions about how to handle such efforts.

John began talking about this at around the 3:58 mark into the webmaster hangout on Friday. In short he described this efforts where comparison sites or coupon sites, “where a company will take a subdomain of an existing website and put their content there and use that to promote their contact.” He said Google takes this feedback “very seriously” and “the search leads at Google have been talking about this this exact topic for a while now.” But they are still not sure what is the right action to take because the content isn’t outright spam but might be lower quality. He said “they’re not really spam they’re just they’re just kind of sales pages affiliate pages that are hosted within another website.”

John said “maybe the right approach is to find a way to figure out like what is the primary topic of this website and focus more on that and then kind of leave these other things on the side.” He added that Google does look at the overall quality of a site and this may be hurting it. But he said “I don’t think there’s one clear-cut answer where we’d say like this is exactly what Google should do and delete all of these sites or demote them completely or get rid of all coupon sites to be fair or I don’t know.”