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I have a website with 3.5M pages (one page for a product) but Google is only indexing about 1M pages according to google.com/webmasters

I was thinking of classifying these products in a few categories, say about 50 and use those categories as subdomains. For example:

  • category1.abcxyz.com/product-1
  • category1.abcxyz.com/product-2
  • category2.abcxyz.com/product-3

Each product will show up under only one subdomain so that there's no duplicate content. I understand that Google treats subdomains as islands so there will be a rank hit if I do this. However, Google isn't indexing all pages anyway, so is this a good SEO approach? Can this actually increase traffic to 3X, given it would index all pages with this approach?

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    Sub-domains are not your answer. Fixing the problem is your answer. You have to figure out what Google does not like about the pages it does not index and fix it. Otherwise, you are just moving the problem and making it worse. Cheers!! – closetnoc Jun 24 '16 at 17:35
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Google is indexing only a portion of your pages because your site doesn't have enough reputation. Splitting your reputation between three subdomains isn't going to help. You will still only be able to get 1M pages indexed.

You need to increase the reputation of your site.

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If the subdomains run all on the same server, then its bad speed-wise. I tried it myself and noticed higher TTFB values when I ran them under webpagetest.org

Also, each new subdomain request is like trying to connect to a website.

For example, if your main page is at example.com and a user clicks on a link to your product page located at products.example.com then the user will have to wait for their computer to look up example.com then when the user clicks on the product page, there will be waiting time for products.example.com as well. This waiting time is the DNS lookup time.

If instead you had the same situation but the links are instead example.com and example.com/products, then one DNS lookup time will be eliminated since both of these URLs are on one domain and that domain is cached in the user's computer since example.com was accessed.

Therefore your idea could make things slower for the client which means your idea is not good, especially if you want to use hundreds of subdomains.

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  • Thanks. If I will only have 50 subdomains, I can use the DNS prefetch meta tag to remove the DNS lookup time for subsequent clicks. So performance isn't really a concern for me right now. – Paul Borza Jun 24 '16 at 17:21
  • Saying "performance isn't really a concern for me" is almost never a good thing. – Andrew Lott Jun 25 '16 at 20:44

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