Forbes And Subdomain Pages

If you have had a chance to see the "special advertising at Forbes" article and discussion by web guerilla on webmasterradio the you saw a great example of the aged domain advantage on the web. Recently SEO guru Greg Boser noticed a drop down menu on the bottom of Forbes.com that linked to pre laid out subdomain pages clearly marked as advertising pages. It seemed to me to be somewhat of a doorway page and clearly a violation of search TOS and a bit of a exploitation of the respect given to a site like Forbes.com.

As of March 17th, 2006 the pages which had previously ben very high ranking for mnay top competitive terms that are not relevent to the forbes website were then removed. It appeared that forbes had used subdomain to get high website rank based on being a trusted domain in the eyes of google.com. It also appears that after discussion the issue on webmasterradio.fm program "seo rockstars" the pages were manually removed from the index.

In my opinion the system involving subdomains and ranking which is gauged sitewide is flawed and this was an example of a webmaster and website taking advantage of that flaw. Subdomain get treated as new subject matter and need to rank independent of the domains status to prevent this method.

This type of subdomain on an established domain s/pam is the primary form of serp congestion in many competetive markets.