Google Webmaster Tools: Subdomains As Internal Links

Google classifies subdomains as internal links as they continue to change the way of categorizing link data in Webmaster Tools. Webmaster Tools lists links on two separate categories, that is sorting the links pointing on your site as: the links coming from other sites, and links from within your site.

The update will not change the total number of the links pointing on your domain but will going to present it in a different way giving you an idea on which links are the one that actually came from your site and which links are coming from other sites. The catch is "Google is now considering those link coming from a subdomain" as internal links. To give an example considering a link from blog.seouragon.com to www.seouragon.com will no longer show as a link from external domain, but merely will be a link from internal domain.

Google Explained:

"Most people think of example.com and www.example.com as the same site these days, so we're changing it such that now, if you add either example.com or www.example.com as a site, links from both the www and non-www versions of the domain will be categorized as internal links. We've also extended this idea to include other subdomains, since many people who own a domain also own its subdomains-so links from cats.example.com or pets.example.com will also be categorized as internal links for www.example.com."

The number of your external links may appear to go down on the Webmaster Tools lists links due to this changes, but take note that total number of links (internal + external) will not be affected.

What will be the impact of this to the subdomains? Will subdomains be less listed on Google search results or be grouped in the Sitelinks pack? Take into consideration on what Google did in order to less the results from the same domain by introducing the 12 sitelink pack. For now, lets wait on how Google handles and treat the subdomains on their search result.