It caught my attention that a lot of EMD is coming back in search results, it’s interesting to see if a subdomain could have similar power with 0 cost (you can create unlimited subdomains for free).
We did a few tests some time ago showing that exact match keyword in subdomain has power. This time we want to retest it and see if this could be combined with the power of keyword in URL.
Test Downloads
Transcription Below
CLINT: All right. This one is test 480: the power of exact match subdomain. The idea behind this is you have, let's say, a domain and you're on the cheaps but you want a bunch of backlinks. You can actually create subdomain. So, subdomain is a brand new website.
Google looks at it as a brand new website and you can do that to your heart's content on your URL, create a single page lander for a particular keyword. Will you get a boost from it by having your keyword in the subdomain? Let's think of an application lawnmower, he's got the lawn mower king and he can actually if he wanted to make a subdomain for one of the lawn mowers, a specific brand.
The test results here are pretty clear that that works really really well. Google likes it. So, you could pretty much go to town on that concept to your heart's content regardless of how many subdomains you build.
DORI: Yes, you could use your subdomains as kill pages as well.
CLINT: That's true. I was thinking about that just as I was talking as we were talking yesterday about the buffer. That's right. You do have to be a little bit more careful because I have seen manual penalties passed on from a subdomain to the main domain but I've been able to lift the manual penalties for the main domain while not addressing the manual penalty on the subdomain.
There is a little bit of risk there if you're going through that process but I think that this is actually something practical you can do, especially if you were in the PPC market and you're doing landing pages. Take those landing pages off of your main domain and put them on subdomains with keyword optimized.
Optimize the content using whatever quality score you want to and then build your conversions and then optimize for SEO and then you have an instant backlink to whatever you're doing and really get a "Google-approved" subdomain on your own domain. Technically, it's an internal link from your domain but it's not from your website so Google is seeing that as a whole new website so leverage that.