There's a real brouhaha going on right now about a clever exploit by an entrepreneurial webmaster of Google's fondness for quickly indexing the main page of any new site it sees. You can read about it here and here if you want all the details, but the gist of the technique involves creating thousands of keyword-based subdomains and getting Google to index them and then displaying ads on those pages. It's the single-page AdSense site applied to the max. While it sounds like a lot of work, in reality it's not because all you need is to have control over the DNS mappings for a domain and to map requests for any subdomain of that domain to the same page on the main domain. In other words, whenever a request for something like “foo.mydomain.com” comes along, internally change it to “www.mydomain.com?subdomain=foo” and have a script running on “www.mydomain.com” that generates a keyword-rich page of content based on the requested subdomain. Geeky stuff, to be sure, but not rocket science.
But it certainly does present a nice opportunity to revisit the single-page AdSense site concept and to apply what we talked about before to subdomains.
What is a subdomain?
First, though, let's make sure we're all on the same page. If you know what a subdomain is, just skip to the next section.
A subdomain is a subdivision of a domain. A period separates a subdomain from its parent domain in a fully-qualified domain name. Thus “www” is actually a subdomain of “memwg.com” and “memwg” is a subdomain of “com”.
Subdomains are usually assigned to different machines. For example, “mail.mydomain.com” and “www.mydomain.com” might be different machines. Or they may in fact be the same machine. Subdomains are controlled by the entity that controls the parent entity. So while “memwg.com” is controlled by the “com” top-level domain, “www.memwg.com” is actually controlled by “memwg.com” (me). Mapping multiple domains to the same machine is in fact very common, most of the time a domain and its “www” subdomain are mapped to the same web server, a fact which can actually cause some issues with search engines if other sites link to your site inconsistently (some using the “www” form of the domain name, some using the non-”www” form — but that's a separate discussion).
How to get a single page indexed in Google
Google generally treats each subdomain as a separate site. Whenever Google encounters a new site, it always indexes the root page of the site. That may in fact be all it indexes: generally you need links to your site, particularly deep links (links to specific pages within the site) to get more of your pages indexed. That, of course, takes time, and so it can be weeks or months before you start seeing your other pages show up in Google's search results.
That's why the single-page AdSense site can be effective. You build a single page of good content built around a specific keyword phrase hosted on a relevant domain. It gets indexed fairly quickly and then you wait to see if you make any money from that topic before deciding to expand the site or not. Look at NoDebtIsGood.com (or its opposite, DebtIsGreat.com) to see what I mean.
Harnessing the power of subdomains
One problem with the single-page AdSense site strategy is that it can be expensive and time-consuming to acquire the domains you need to host those individual pages. Using subdomains is a way around this problem, because all you need is one domain and the ability to host multiple sites as subdomains (this depends on the hosting service you use). Finding the domain for this kind of scenario is actually easier, because you don't actually want a keyword-rich domain unless all the sites on that domain are related to the same keyword.
The nice thing about subdomains is that it's easy to create a keyword-rich subdomain because you control the parent domain. Any hot generic term is available to you as a subdomain. (Well, watch out for trademarks…)
So if you want to give the single-page AdSense site strategy a go, use subdomains, but do it quickly. The webmaster who's been causing all this fuss over Google's treatment of subdomains may force them to rethink their quick-root-page-indexing algorithm.
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Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.