Google announced in their official Webmaster Central Blog that changes are being made on Google Webmaster Tools- From now on, links from your site’s subdomains will be counted as internal links and not external as before.

What Is It Subdomain And How Google Relates It Now Now?

Although you might have thought that the websites Domain.com and www.Domain.com are the same one, search engines see them as two different websites. This specific issue of WWW and non-WWW have been fixed long time ago when you could define your preferred domain on your Google Webmaster Tools settings.

However, the issues with other subdomains like Jobs.Domain.com or Games.Domain.com haven’t been resolved or at least gained a proper response from Google on how it relates to them until now. What Google is basically trying to tell us with this new change is that subdomains are completely considered as an integral part of the website and links from them will be counted as links WITHIN the website.

As a result, If your website contains subdomain(s) you will probably notice a drop in your “Links to your site” section on Webmaster Tools. If your website doesn’t contains subdomains you won’t see any difference. Learn more from this article how to use Google Webmaster Tools.

Affect On Rankings?

As for this moment, it is pretty unclear how this change will affect search rankings (if at all). It is more than possible that the change was integrated to the search algorithm a while before, but only now it is being displayed on the Webmaster Tools.