About Those Coupon Subdomains…Er, I Mean Subfolders

In September, I wrote about how despite Google claiming that it was taking aim at irrelevant content hosted on third-party subdomains, coupon subdomains on media sites were still generating a ton of traffic and revenue.

Given this thread between Danny Sullivan, Lily Ray and an assortment of other SEOs, I thought I’d check up on how these coupon subdomains were doing. The TLDR: Not good:

Coupons.cnn.com

Coupons.BusinessInsider.com

Coupons.CNet.com

But Wait: Coupons.USAToday.com

So it seems like a lot of these subdomains are getting crushed, but USAToday appears to have benefitted from a November update. Is it a newspaper thing? I mean in prehistoric times, newspapers used to be the main source of coupons. Let’s check another one.

LATimes.com/coupon-codes

A small data set to be sure, but if this pattern holds true for more similar sites, it seems like the way out of this might be to redirect all those coupon subdomains to subfolders….