Home > News > We’re testing subdomains on staff accounts

Copyright Dan Craig via vi.sualize.us

You might have noticed earlier today that we’ve started testing author subdomains on a few Squidoo staff lenses.

For example, the URL for one of my own lenses: http://www.squidoo.com/lensbrainstorm

Now looks like this: http://megancasey.squidoo.com/lensbrainstorm

You’ll see that lenses written by Bonnie, Gil, Robin and a few other staffers all have this new subdomain structure.

So what’s this all about?

We’re rolling out a very limited test of lensmaster name-based subdomains in order to determine whether search engines prefer it as a way to feature content. We, and Google, have a desire to understand more about authors and how they are grouped, indexed and discovered on the web. We think it’s probably a good thing to be able to signal who specific authors are, by grouping their lenses together into an author-based subdomain of Squidoo. We also think that high-quality lensmasters would be the ones to most benefit from this change.

Using subdomains is not a new concept, and other sites use this structure already. Some have always done it, while others have done it in an attempt to recover from Google’s Panda algorithm change. Squidoo was not negatively affected by Panda, which puts us in the nice position of being proactive with this test rather than reactive. There’s a lot of external data telling us this is a worthwhile test, and we wanted to do a very small test to gather our own data. I always prefer making these kinds of decisions based on hard facts instead of hearsay.

This first test is limited to staff accounts because while we expect it will be a good SEO move and will lead to more traffic (not less) we want to be damn sure that bugs are worked out and data is positive before we accept a single lensmaster volunteer for this.

We’ll be watching our accounts over the next week or so to see what happens with our personal lens traffic. If the first test goes well, chances are good we’ll be looking for a few volunteers in the coming weeks. We’ll let you know how it goes.