Google starts penalizing websites which have their domains leased

We had recently reported that Google is against the act of leasing domains as well as renting them. Basically, if you have ever given your domain to someone for money or you have let them host their website on your property then it is called as domain renting. Domain leasing, on the other hand, is similar to domain renting but you give a share of your domain for short or long period of time to someone. If you have heard about subdomains and subfolders, it is to basically give subdomains or subfolders of your main domain away for benefits.

For example, you might have seen a particular website which runs on the main domain pointing to website.com. However, a totally different and unrelated website is running on a subfolder named website.com/news and another different website is running on an address such as news.website.com. Now, you should note that all these are considered as different websites unless and until they all redirect to the same address. This is called domain leasing and Google has now become strict on this.

There is evidence out there in the SEO community which suggests that Google has started to crack down on domain leasing. Basically, all those websites which are hosted on leased domains are starting to see massive drops in their search rankings. It is also being said that EU and US sites are being affected mostly at the moment. One member of the community wrote on Twitter that he believes Google has taken measures to “detect unrelated third-party content placed in subfolders.” However, he also mentions that subdomains seem to be unaffected at the moment.

Like https://t.co/r4drzGzUrt, https://t.co/UdLQsL1bbS, https://t.co/EU6IcVir5E, https://t.co/ADaUc7YNTv, https://t.co/SWgVYGK8tL ?

— Yvo Schaap (@yvoschaap) August 28, 2019

A Twitter user named Yvo Schaap also shows that most of the coupons and puzzles related websites are seeing a massive drop in traffic to the tune of up to 40%.