Subdomain Research Tool

[iSTORM-New-Media]

Does anybody know of a research tool that can track the amount of subdomains on a root domain?

Maybe there is a way to manipulate a Google search to display the different subdomains that are indexed?

[MichaelC-15022]

Cool, looking forward to the ad-hoc query tool!

[iSTORM-New-Media]

Thanks for the update Jon! Looking forward to the updates to come and to be able to manipulate the data in new ways. Should be exciting trying to figure new ways to explore things like subdomain counts.

Thanks again!

[jon.white]

Hey guys!

So I spoke to the MozScape team and right now this is not possible.  Although in theory we have the data to answer this question, due to the sheer size of the dataset the engineering teams have to make data structure and optimization decisions that favor certain use cases (e.g. 'show me all of the external followed links for a root domain').  Currently MozScape is not optimized to answer the use case 'show me all of the subdomains on a given root domain'.

However, you may know we are working on index updates that are going to change the way we store data - this is a huge project, but once it is completed we will be able to run ad-hoc queries against our data, and solve use cases like this.

Hope this helps!

Jon

[iSTORM-New-Media]

This would be a very handy addition. As Michael has said, using search qualifiers is no quick (or absolute) solution. This would be a great tool for site audits as this was what I was looking for. It would also be useful for searching out other sites (that have been crawled by Moz) to quickly search out blog subdomains or other language subdomains.

Anyway, thanks for the response - looking forward to see if this becomes an available tool!

[jon.white]

Thanks Michael - great idea!  I could see this fitting in the MozBar, maybe in OSE.  Let me do some digging into how our index is structured and I will get an update back up here on feasibility.

[MichaelC-15022]

That's a good question...I've not seen a tool that magically does all of that, but certainly Moz could get that from the data they get when they crawl.  I'll pass along that idea to Jon White.

I would use this tool myself during site audits, when I'm looking to see if the client's site has subdomains other than www that might be worth consolidating onto the www subdomain.

Today, I do it arduously with Google site: -inurl queries, e.g.

site:acme.com -inurl:www -inurl:blog

and then when I see a new subdomain appear, e.g. news.acme.com, then I append -inurl:news to the site: search.

This doesn't work if the client has decided that the www-less version of their domain is their preferred one...in this case, I'm totally SOL.