When did subdomains start appearing in a Google site: search? In other words, a site:www.somedomain.com used to only show results with urls from www.somedomain.com.
Now, subdomains are showing, such as sub1.somedomain.com and sub2.somedomain.com.
Ok, here, try some for yourself.
Just in case you don't see what I see (or things change), here's a screen shot of a site:www.about.com command.
Ok, so what does it mean?
Well, it could just be yet another site: command foobar. Certainly wouldn't be the first time site: gave weird results.
On the other hand, it could mean that Google no longer considers subdomains to be separate sites. That could be a big thing!
What would that mean in terms of rankings for those sites? Would about.com suddenly rank for more terms? Or less terms?
What impact might this have on subdomain spammer tricks?
We've all given advice to newbies about how Google treats subdomains as separate sites. We may need to take that advice out of our repetoire if this really does represent a major change in Google's thinking.
What do you think about this?
Hat tip to Michael.
Note: site:somedomain.com always returned all subdomains. So, is site:www.somedomain.com now equal to site:somedomain.com ? Could this be some kind of canonical change?