Why use a wwwP subdomain naming convention

[dodgejd]

While working through a series of crawl reports and competitive insights for a site, I noticed one of the competitors had switched from a WWW-version to a wwwP-version. Looking back at the snapshot I took of this during the same time period in 2014, I noticed a significant drop in PA/DA by 20+/-.

I'm curious to know if anybody else has experienced something similar, and if anybody can provide insights on why a change like this would even be made?

I'll preface it with, everything we could see that this competitor was doing from the outside, was legitimate and propelling them in a positive direction.

[dodgejd]

Great points and very much appreciated discussion.

Upon further digging it very well could be CMS driven and either as an unknown by them, or one of those "it is what it is" situations and they're moving forward. This organization I cannot see it being anything of false legitimacy by any means.

I noticed it's on a lot of their top-level pages, especially navigation items and not necessarily secondary or tertiary level pages. This leads me to another speculation that they could be working on some A/B user testing also.

The wwwP is not being indexed or showing in the SERPs either.

[garfield_disliker]

Tough to say without more information. You could probably get a better idea by checking for other subdomains on that domain, what need they would have for subdomains (staging versions, international versions, archived sites, etc.), and if the old subdomain is still accessible. Might be intentional, might have been a mistake. I've seen a number of sites use wildcard subdomains and then accidentally get like 500 different arbitrary subdomains indexed.

If it's a large site, it may be because there is a particular CMS or some kind of technology on that particular subdomain that doesn't exist on the rest of the site. E.g., some sites will have a wordpress blog, but the Wordpress installation is only on a particular subdirectory [www.example.com/blog/] or on a particular subdomain [blog.example.com]. You could probably use something like the Chrome extension Wappalyzer and see what they're using that starts with a P and might find something there. Might be a PMwiki or Percussion install and they simply chose to handle it in a less than ideal way.

Doesn't necessarily make sense that domain authority would drop lockstep with page authority though.

Also, I'm not saying this is the case here, but it's worth keeping in mind when doing competitive analysis: Just because what you saw from the outside was legitimate, doesn't mean it was all legitimate. Some companies doing spammy linkbuilding behind the scenes block Moz's, Majestic's, etc. crawlers to prevent competitive insights.