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Pope3001725

: Why my subdomains are ranking really high. I have a site with many users. Lets say my site is called thecommunity.com. For each of my users I give them a free url such as jason.thecommunity.com

@Pope3001725

Posted in: #Seo #Subdomain

I have a site with many users. Lets say my site is called thecommunity.com.

For each of my users I give them a free url such as jason.thecommunity.com or susan.thecommunity.com

These subdomains really just render their thecommunity.com profile page. I use wildcards in dns and all *.thecommunity.com requests are sent to the main domain. In the main domain I look at the request and if there is a subdomain I just render their profile page. So jason.thecommunity.com looks exactly like thecommunity.com/jason

When you are at jason.thecommunity.com you can still click around the full site but your clicking around using the jason.thecommunity.com subdomain, accessing pages that are also available on thecommunity.com

This created thousands of subdomains. Any many of them are suddenly ranking very high in search results. For instance a search for soup recipe might have jason.thecommunity.com/soups/recipeas the top result!

But thecommunity.com/soups/recipe is not even in the first say 100 pages of results. My traffic has increased x 5 which is a pretty big number. Most of this search traffic is coming into my subdomains vs the main site.

Any reason for this?

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@Kimberly868

To summarise the comments from @Michael Hampton and @w3dk :

Your users are providing great content (like the soup recipe) and it's gaining backlinks, traffic, and visibility.

You should be adding a rel=canonical tag to your page headers that is a cross-domain suggestion that Google index another address for the content. When it's indexing the page on your domain, you domain gains equity rather than the subdomain (which is seen as a different site to Google).

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