Carolyn Shelby posted an interesting article at her blog about a website that is using one of the oldest an obvious spamdexing techniques there is at

http://www.cshel.com/seosem/2007/05/how-well-does-the-google-algo-catch-spamdexers/

I was actually a little surprised. I know many of us build a few sites to send some linking juice to our sites, however parking 5000 or more domains on a parking page template meant to send links to the main site is a tad overboard, especially when they are all identical replicated website. That should trip a few filters here and there, or so some engines would have us think… But it sure works and I do notsee any of the engines doing anything about it since her article was posted. I expect more than a few black hats are already on this bandwagon.

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This question is asked of me at least a few times a week, so I decided to develop a tool to check it. While I am not going to let everyone and their brother use my API key and google no longer gives out new keys for the SOAP API, I will explain how to do this task. It really is not difficult and I am sure some of you will be making your own tools to do it quickly enough after reading this anyway.

First let's find out how many pages of your website that Google knows about using the query: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.yourdomain.com

Next let's see how many pages of your website that Google has listed in it's supplemental index using this query: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.yourdomain.com+***+-view

Now simply do the math to get the percentage of your website in the supplemental index.

How did your score turn out?

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As pointed out by Barry, a friend of mine over at seroundtable.com (http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/007250.html), google seems to now be seeing subdomains of a website as being from the same domain as the root.

Some examples that Barry and SEO Scoop noticed are:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.seroundtable.com
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.about.com
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.blogspot.com
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.craigslist.org

Until I saw Barrys post I had never seen subdomains come up in searches for www.domain.com before using the site: operator.

Maybe the bit in googles webmaster central that allows you to specifiy www.domain.com or domain.com of a website is finally working properly, or possibly this is gathered from the xml sitemaps data.

This may affect those who rely on links from subdomains being seen as seperate entities and holding a little extra weight than normal internal links.

 Update (Jan 22: 11.23am)

CrankyDave Said: "ETA… Just checked 2 of links you posted Will (about and craigslist) and neither were showing any subdomains. Perhaps it's the DC I hit."

 You are correct. I am not seeing them there any longer either, tho they are still on 4 DC's, so it may just be an engineer playing with some new changes on those DC's. If that is the case, then it could be something we can expect across the board soon if it works out as expected.

Update (Jan 23: 8am) As noted on RustyBricks log, Google says this was a mistake and is being corrected.

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The DMOZ Open Directory Project is one of the largest human-edited directories on the web. Two months ago the DMOZ Directory was down for nearly ten days and disallowed any editors to login and approve/deny any websites submitted to the directory. AOL claims that it was a hardware failure and after a few days they were able to scrounge up a recovery of the DMOZ data that was lost.

However, they did not allow new submissions since they were still trying to recover lost data. Well it seems that the Open Directory Project has opened it's doors to new submissions. They lost their previously queued data, so the editors have empty categories. If you have nothing better to do, go and give them sites to review!

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At a recent SES Conference, one webmaster asked to have his website reviewed by a panel of judges consisting of:

1. Greg Boser
2. Tim Mayer
3. Danny Sullivan
4. Todd Friesen
5. Jake Baillie
6. Matt Cutts

This webmaster asked to have a website which was related to real-estate licensing to be reviewed by the panel members. In a minute or so, Matt Cutts had found over 50 other domain names which were related to teaching Spanish and Military Training. Matt Cutts had his laptop hidden from the other panel members and made sure the camera couldn't see which tool he was using.

Most people would ask the the obvious question the webmaster asked "What does my other domain names have to do with the quality score of this domain name?" and that's what all other SES members asked as well.

This little clue might give other SEO's a hint on why Google became their own Domain Name Registrar. Googe would not be able to view every other domain which is registered by a user, but if those domains are registered through their partners like GoDaddy, Google can easily take a glance at other domain names owned by a webmaster.

Now this would cause a good amount of controversy over the topic of whether you should cut down on the excess amount of domain names in your account so that one website can flourish.

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