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Subdomain Content Post Penalty

by sayers
3 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hi,

Facing a bit of a conundrum, and any advice would be greatly appreciated.

In 2011 my site was hit by a Panda update. I identified the biggest risk to be a disproportionate ratio of exact match anchor text used for my primary keyword. Bearing in mind this was before Penguin...

So the decision was made to switch the brand/domain name to my primary keyword, and this worked a treat... Until EMD landed of course.

As a way of hoodwinking Google I then trialed subdomaining my content, to effectively create new domains, that were dissociated from the main penalized root domain.. There are 5 products sold on the site, and separate subdomains were created for each. Somewhat surprisingly, this was very successful, and for the past year or so I have ranked in the top few positions on page 1 for the majority of my niches money terms, including my EMD brand name [item]forsale.co.uk. Each of the subdomains has been ranking really well.

I am soon to launch a new site, and of course would rather return to a flat folder structure, with all content back on the main domain. I don't see the use of all these subdomains as 'futureproof', and I'd have thought at some point Google will create the association between the domains, and work out what we're doing.

Lastly, and this is where the problem lies, I have trialed moving the content from one domain back onto www and lost all my rankings pretty much over the space of 2 weeks.

Sorry for the essay, but any advice/thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Mainly on the overuse of subdomains for SEO purposes, and whether you think this would risk the wrath of Google going forward (although it has been working for us for over a year now.)

Thanks
Sayers
#content #penalty #post #subdomain
  • Profile picture of the author godoveryou
    Well, a subdomain is treated as a new domain by Google, which is probably what began to affect the penalty situation on the old domain... and in the process you killed an entire established (sub)domain which wasn't a great idea.

    That having been said, use a tree structure with your new domain and you should be fine.... unless you are just moving content and thinking you will 301 the old domain to the new domain. I wouldn't do that.
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  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    Your sub-domains didn't save you, the new backlinks to the sub-domains saved you. Sub-domains on their own doesn't matter, you can't have too many sub-domains. Look at sites like about.com, boat load of sub-domains on every niche.

    Speaking of about.com, doing a site:about.com returns dozens of sub-domains so obviously Google is lumping in all those sub-domains with the root domain.

    Obviously transferring all the content/pages from a sub-domain page to a root domain would fail, the SERP rank was based on the sub-domain page, the page that was optimized (links).

    OP didn't mention a 301 so I'm guessing he just moved the content from a sub-domain to a root domain, so nothing was passed from the old/dead URL to the new live URL.

    You can't rank a page, delete the page/URL & expect a new URL/page to rank on it's own. It's not going to happen.
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    • Profile picture of the author sayers
      Thanks for the responses.

      I should have been clearer. I did use 301's when moving the content both to the subdomain initially, and of course when trialling moving it back onto www 2 years later.

      Additionally, all internal links relevant to that category were changed across the domains and subdomains to reflect the new URL structure.
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