Are Subdomains provided by free website hosting services SEO Friendly?

Question

By now, I've already read a lot about the myths and realities concerning the sub-domain vs sub-directory chaos. But that is not what my question really is. What I really want to know is that whether the sub-domains provided by free hosting sites hurt the SEO of my site. Take, for example, freehostingnoads.net - a website that provides free hosting but imposes a must-have sub-domain restriction. If I wanted to register a site called "mysite", I would rather have to choose "mysite.freehostingnoads.com". Now, if I choose this (or any similar site) for hosting my website, will my SEO ranking be impacted?

For what I've come to know, it's just the content that matters. But they probably didn't even consider the "free hosting sub-domain" case.

Answer 1

Like everything regarding SEO and domain structure, the answer is 'it depends'

By operating a website with a subdomain you do not own, you are always at the mercy of the owner of the domains - this is why any .edu subdomains you create via afraid.org cannot be indexed by Google, else they would be subject to abuse.

But other subdomain examples showcase great success, typically the .wordpress and .tumblr type of subdomains showcase little to no negative effect.

I recommend that you qualify the domain structure - type in site:*.example.com -inurl:http://example.com -inurl:http://www.example.com and see what type of results are produced.

Grab a list of these websites and see if they have any SEO performance (visibility in SEMRush, does related:example.com produce results? etc.)

From there, you should be able to ascertain if there is any value from your Hosting provider. Having a quick look at your free hosting nomads example, the websites from there seem to have some indexing issues for internal pages - though this may just be due to the typical user for this service simply isn't any good at SEO and there wouldn't be any particular reason why a proper SEO profesisonal couldn't gain traffic from this.

Answer 2

It's depend on what type of people using their service.

If you're using blogspot, wordpress, herokuapp, appspot, then you should not worry about SEO damage, because these type of service used by both good and bad blogger. And Which is OK for search engine spider.

Now, if you use some third party webhost for example 000webhost, then it might be not good for seo, because there are many kids use their site for phising attacks or create fake pages for fun, so if your most of neighbor subdomains is bad, then it might be not good for SEO.