7 ms·

SEO penalties of moving our blog to a subdomain

110 points by chriswrites 12y ago

b1twise 12y ago
Yeah, this is one of the most frustrating things about Google. They're opaque to reduce gaming of the system, but that same quality makes it easy to accidentally choose something Google doesn't like. I'm going to stop short of calling Matt Cutts a liar, but his word isn't always right. Moz seems to tell the truth as they discover it. The only interactions I've had with Google essentially lead to "why don't you spend more money on Adwords!" Well, I won't go into a full rant... hope your traffic recovers.
rrggrr 12y ago
My advice based on recent experience: give it time. We made domain changes and rankings tanked, only to recover. We made a major design change and rankings dived, only to recover. Give Google some time to assess.
- UnoriginalGuy 12y ago
  Yeah, major design changes are painful. Google Webmaster Tools is currently warning me that we have over 100 404s on various URLs, because those pages simply got removed completely. Actually most of those 100 are the same few pages, but Google indexed it a metric shit-ton of times, and then added each of them to the index, and THEN it penalised us for "spamming." I came in, removed it completely, and set up a robots.txt so it couldn't happen again. But the penalties and 404s will take up to a year to completely clear out of Google's end. Funnily enough Bing hasn't penalised the site at all, and we're the number 3 rank for relevant search terms on there (2nd page on Google).
  - pixelcort 12y ago
    Instead of 404, wouldn't it be better to 301 or 302?
    - function_seven 12y ago
      or 410 Gone if the content doesn't live at a new location.
  - JoshTriplett 12y ago
    > Google Webmaster Tools is currently warning me that we have over 100 404s on various URLs, because those pages simply got removed completely. http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html > Actually most of those 100 are the same few pages You could redirect them all to the canonical location for those pages.
    - geofft 12y ago
      It sounds like the content got removed completely, so there should not be a URL (either old or new) for that content. It's true that they should have used 301s or rel=canonical or something in the past, but that also sounds like the least of their past problems, if I'm reading the parent comment right. Right now, I don't think they'd be much better off with 301s to a single URI that 410s instead of just directly serving 404s for everything, even though the 301 to a 410 is more right in some abstract sense.
  - spacecowboy_lon 12y ago
    How does having duplicate content on your domain give you a spamming penty? And for a site thats been a round for a while only having 100 404's is low - most site owners are v bad at tidying up old defunct urls and using script kiddie platforms like joomla and magento dont help.
ericclemmons 12y ago
As someone who has worked on the tech side of sites powered entirely by organic SEO, I've definitely seen the same penalties occur when cosmetically "cleaning up" URLs or code. In the author's case, they moved to sub domain for easier maintenance. The article ended with a transparent way of keeping the old URLs and correctly improving the tech behind the scenes. Be careful of changes, even if endorsed by Google, when things are working. More often than not, there'll be a mistake, you send the wrong signal to Google, and you take a hit. Only do it, IMO, when there's nowhere to go but up :)
- Scoundreller 12y ago
  > More often than not, there'll be a mistake, you send the wrong signal to Google, and you take a hit. There's probably a publication bias here. When people change things and traffic goes up, they don't run to tell the world about it. Though anecdotally, I have a lot of reference-type content that has been bubbling up over the years seemingly solely because it hasn't changed at all in 7 years. The big players like to refresh their design and layout every few years.
  - ericclemmons 12y ago
    You're absolutely right! In my experience, we've had more bad than good with URL changes. The interesting part is that often a "URL cleanup" would result in a quick "boost" in traffic/rankings, but would continually slump, often even unrecoverable after reverting.
- paromi 12y ago
  This is true. If it works dont change it. I had many experiences with google and penalties. Now im afraid even to add a banner to a site because google might not like it.
yesimahuman 12y ago
This is so timely for us. We are thinking of moving ionicframework/blog to blog.ionicframework.com/, but I was concerned about a possible SEO impact. The nginx proxy did cross my mind, though doing the permalink mapping is going to be annoying. Oh well, lesson learned! Thank you for sharing.
josephjrobison 12y ago
Thanks for this case study - super important. We use Hubspot and I brought up this issue with them as we want to add a blog to our site using Hubspot, and the only option is to use a subdomain. They pointed me to that Cutts video and said they have the Hubspot blog on their subdomain and it's no problem. But in their example I'm pretty sure the Hubspot blog does well in spite of being on a blog.hubspot.com subdomain and not "no matter where it is". I would trust Rand on this one over Cutts as well.
programminggeek 12y ago
This is pretty standard advice. You want your blog on the same domain. Subdomains are generally treated not exactly the same as content on the same domain. There are a lot of very good reasons to have your blog on the same domain and relatively few to have it on a subdomain. The extra traffic outweighs any benefit to putting it on a subdomain.
jsm386 12y ago
To paraphrase what b1twise wrote below I would say do not do as Google says when common sense, lots and lots of case studies, and practitioner consensus say otherwise. Sure...you can move it to a subdomain and if all goes well, great. If not you can cite a Matt Cutts video to say who could have known: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MswMYk05tk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MswMYk05tk If the organic traffic matters then trust people who are actually affected (http://moz.com/community/q/moz-s-official-stance-on-subdomain-vs-subfolder-does-it-need-updating http://moz.com/community/q/moz-s-official-stance-on-subdomai...) and figure out another (yes, much more involved) way to deal like reverse proxying if you have other demands to contend with.
Houshalter 12y ago
It's weird to seeing people obsess over tiny little things just to please an algorithm.
- visakanv 12y ago
  Although if you think about it, a lot of people obsess over tiny little things just to please: * parents * love interest * fashion * social group In a sense we all do it all the time. "Gaming the system" and what have you.
- spacecowboy_lon 12y ago
  as the Drifters said "Monney Honney"
- tiquortoo 12y ago
  An algorithm that is a primary determinate of whether customers find you.
  - Houshalter 12y ago
    Yes of course. I'm not saying that it's irrational, just that it's a strange situation.
codexon 12y ago
I moved languages to a subdomain instead of query strings as suggested by a Google website, and my rankings plummeted.
- nzealand 12y ago
  Did you redirect?
  - codexon 12y ago
    yes
franze 12y ago
what's up with all this SEO bullshit on HN in the last few days? and bullshit it is. let's start, i will try to not let this sound too much like a rant, but i can guarantee nothing. let's do a wittgenstein. do not use the word penalty. a penalty is when you look into google webmaster tools (of all your protocol & subdomains & domains variation and you have a message, that you have a penalty. go on, look into https://iwantmyname.com http://iwantmyname.com https://www.iwantmyname. http://www.iwantmyname.com http://blog.iwantmyname.com .. other subdomains .. nothing there? then don't use the world penalty, it has no meaning. this and your mention in your post of the worst bloodsucking (a.k.a. toolselling) "seo" publication ever leads me to the first issue: you are reading SEO blogs! stop it. do not reed SEO blogs, ever. you will reduce your understanding of google as soon as you start reading SEO blogs. there are 400+ specs and recommendations directly by google of what you have to do to perform well in google, read them first. the issue at hand is: you got traffic for your blogpost content before the move, then you moved it to another protocol + subdomain combination, you got less traffic, with no positive trend. this was not the desired traffic behaviour. this was the issue. your hypothesis is that the traffic drop has to do with the move as the is a strong timely correlation. sound sensemaking. first of all, be honest in what you did: you * from a quick view i would say your blog pages are majority of your pages * you changed the URL of the majority of your pages * you changed the subdomain of the majority of your pages * you changed the protocol of the majority of your pages additionally the minority of the pages has only a very poor interlinking to the majority of the pages (only the blog start page is ever linked) additionally the blog content seems to be high quality content, while on the subdomain-less site you seem to have lots of very poor content landing pages (duplicate with a hint of text templates) targeting the different domains suffixes https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aiwantmyname.com+Easy+and+user-friendly+domain+name+management+Simple+setup+for+the+best+web+apps+and+services+Full+ownership+and+DNS+control+over+your+domain+Free+WHOIS+address+masking+to+protect+your+privacy+Fast%2C+friendly+and+personal+customer+support&pws=0&hl=en https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aiwantmyname.com+Easy+... google now has two statements * I) a priori: another protocol/subdomain == another domain independet webproperty * II) google can deal with webproperties split over differnt domains / protocolls if it can determine that they belong together. the big question is now - did google see the new subdomains as part of the iwantmyname.com webproperty. well, let's look at site:iwantmyname.com https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aiwantmyname.com&pws=0&hl=en#q=site:iwantmyname.com&pws=0&hl=en&start=50 https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aiwantmyname.com&pws=0... y google is rewriting their snippet headlines to your pages to have " - iWantMyName" in there. if i do a site:blog.iwantmyname.com" https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ablog.iwantmyname.com&pws=0&hl=en#q=site:blog.iwantmyname.com&pws=0&hl=en&start=10 https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ablog.iwantmyname.com&... i get a lot " - Domain Blog" in the search snippets. why is this, well basically your blog start page link points to the blog start page and has the underlying text "Domain blog" your titles are not as recommended by google (see: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?hl=en#3 https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?hl=en#3 section "brand your titles") the title issue should have been a major warning. we could probably find much more if we would have google webmaster tools access to all the subdomains (protocols) and subdirectories. but the biggest warning was the "we did not regain traffic" issue. but - based on your blog post - the thing you did was, you waited? and well, here we are with the bullshit and SEO blogs topic again where they quite often state, that it "can take a while" whereby they mean an undefined timeframe of 3 to 4 months plus. this is evil. if you do a change and you want to see a positive impact it does not take longer than 2 weeks to see a positive or negative trend. anybody who says something else is just lazy. (note: additionally i could not find any sitemap.xml which well indeed slows down the whole domain migration process, this should have been fixed first and is recommended by google again and again for URL changes and domain moves) so what is the point of this rant: * do not read SEO blogs * do not read SEO blogs * read google specs (in your case: titles, sitemaps, site moves, ..) * don't use the word penalty and maybe, just maybe: if you see a traffic drop and you do not regain your traffic, ask a professional SEO before moving your URLs around again and again. even the worst SEO - after selling you a bloodsucking tool - would have fixed the title, interlinking and probably sitemap issue. or post a thread on the google webmaster forum, actually they are quite helpful there.
netheril96 12y ago
I am a complete noob regarding SEO. My naive interpretation of the drop in rating is that it takes time for Google to rebuild the index. It needs not only the content on your website, but links from other websites and people's clicking habit to determine the ranking. On what level is my interpretation wrong?
- blumkvist 12y ago
  Google treats subdomains (almost) like completely different sites. Links to the root domain do not count for the subdomain and vice versa.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    AFAIK it treats some common subdomains (e.g. "blog.") as part of the main site.
- spacecowboy_lon 12y ago
  not any more back in the day (several years ago) it used to take time for google to index a site
  - mtbcoder 12y ago
    I think he's referring to domain authority (PageRank) and not just indexing. GoogleBot can hit your site several times a day and index things quickly. Building your domain authority on the other hand and connecting all the dots (like your back-link profile) takes a long time.
huhtenberg 12y ago
Hold on. Are you telling me that the drop of 4K views was entirely attributed to getting fewer hits from Google searches? What happened to the bounce rate?
angrybits 12y ago
At the risk of being slightly off-topic, when looking at the phrase "for better maintainability and performance with GitHub Pages' CDN and future-proofing in case we wanted to switch to a different platform down the road", I do not see a compelling reason for the work expenditure. Unsurprisingly, in solving problems they didn't actually have, they managed to create an entirely new set of problems that they wouldn't have otherwise had. (And the problems they created look to have teeth to boot.) To me, the lesson here is not about SEO, it's about effective management.
mod 12y ago
If the image is correct, then I must be misunderstanding something. If the arrow is where you made you change to blog., what was the penalty? A very, very slight downtick in traffic from July -> August? Maybe you meant to say you made the switch in June?
- treitnauer 12y ago
  We moved it at the very beginning of July. I made that more clear in the article now. Thanks for pointing that out!
  - avalaunch 12y ago
    I just read the article and looked at the image and it's still really unclear. It looks like you lost all your traffic immediately prior to switching to the subdomain and nothing in the article said otherwise.
    - pimlottc 12y ago
      It's not clear exactly how that graph works; if the indicated bullet point represents "total pages views in July" then it would seem to show a decrease in the period starting immediately after the move.
- BorisMelnik 12y ago
  there are many different types of Google penalties. It doesn't have to be a complete loss of traffic. Sometimes you get bounced back 1 page, other times 3, other times 99 it varies based on the 'offense.' You are correct in stating this was only a slight drop in impressions. In this case I would say this is Googles fuck up. The algorithm is not mature or smart enough to see that the blog was moved.
- j_s 12y ago
  I agree; also, there is no evidence that restoring to /blog 'fixed' the problem... it's possible they just lost traffic!

110 points by chriswrites 12y ago

Yeah, this is one of the most frustrating things about Google. They're opaque to reduce gaming of the system, but that same quality makes it easy to accidentally choose something Google doesn't like. I'm going to stop short of calling Matt Cutts a liar, but his word isn't always right. Moz seems to tell the truth as they discover it. The only interactions I've had with Google essentially lead to "why don't you spend more money on Adwords!" Well, I won't go into a full rant... hope your traffic recovers.

rrggrr 12y ago

My advice based on recent experience: give it time. We made domain changes and rankings tanked, only to recover. We made a major design change and rankings dived, only to recover. Give Google some time to assess.

UnoriginalGuy 12y ago
Yeah, major design changes are painful. Google Webmaster Tools is currently warning me that we have over 100 404s on various URLs, because those pages simply got removed completely. Actually most of those 100 are the same few pages, but Google indexed it a metric shit-ton of times, and then added each of them to the index, and THEN it penalised us for "spamming." I came in, removed it completely, and set up a robots.txt so it couldn't happen again. But the penalties and 404s will take up to a year to completely clear out of Google's end. Funnily enough Bing hasn't penalised the site at all, and we're the number 3 rank for relevant search terms on there (2nd page on Google).
- pixelcort 12y ago
  Instead of 404, wouldn't it be better to 301 or 302?
  - function_seven 12y ago
    or 410 Gone if the content doesn't live at a new location.
- JoshTriplett 12y ago
  > Google Webmaster Tools is currently warning me that we have over 100 404s on various URLs, because those pages simply got removed completely. http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html > Actually most of those 100 are the same few pages You could redirect them all to the canonical location for those pages.
  - geofft 12y ago
    It sounds like the content got removed completely, so there should not be a URL (either old or new) for that content. It's true that they should have used 301s or rel=canonical or something in the past, but that also sounds like the least of their past problems, if I'm reading the parent comment right. Right now, I don't think they'd be much better off with 301s to a single URI that 410s instead of just directly serving 404s for everything, even though the 301 to a 410 is more right in some abstract sense.
- spacecowboy_lon 12y ago
  How does having duplicate content on your domain give you a spamming penty? And for a site thats been a round for a while only having 100 404's is low - most site owners are v bad at tidying up old defunct urls and using script kiddie platforms like joomla and magento dont help.

ericclemmons 12y ago

As someone who has worked on the tech side of sites powered entirely by organic SEO, I've definitely seen the same penalties occur when cosmetically "cleaning up" URLs or code. In the author's case, they moved to sub domain for easier maintenance. The article ended with a transparent way of keeping the old URLs and correctly improving the tech behind the scenes. Be careful of changes, even if endorsed by Google, when things are working. More often than not, there'll be a mistake, you send the wrong signal to Google, and you take a hit. Only do it, IMO, when there's nowhere to go but up :)

Scoundreller 12y ago
> More often than not, there'll be a mistake, you send the wrong signal to Google, and you take a hit. There's probably a publication bias here. When people change things and traffic goes up, they don't run to tell the world about it. Though anecdotally, I have a lot of reference-type content that has been bubbling up over the years seemingly solely because it hasn't changed at all in 7 years. The big players like to refresh their design and layout every few years.
- ericclemmons 12y ago
  You're absolutely right! In my experience, we've had more bad than good with URL changes. The interesting part is that often a "URL cleanup" would result in a quick "boost" in traffic/rankings, but would continually slump, often even unrecoverable after reverting.
paromi 12y ago
This is true. If it works dont change it. I had many experiences with google and penalties. Now im afraid even to add a banner to a site because google might not like it.

yesimahuman 12y ago

This is so timely for us. We are thinking of moving ionicframework/blog to blog.ionicframework.com/, but I was concerned about a possible SEO impact. The nginx proxy did cross my mind, though doing the permalink mapping is going to be annoying. Oh well, lesson learned! Thank you for sharing.

josephjrobison 12y ago

Thanks for this case study - super important. We use Hubspot and I brought up this issue with them as we want to add a blog to our site using Hubspot, and the only option is to use a subdomain. They pointed me to that Cutts video and said they have the Hubspot blog on their subdomain and it's no problem. But in their example I'm pretty sure the Hubspot blog does well in spite of being on a blog.hubspot.com subdomain and not "no matter where it is". I would trust Rand on this one over Cutts as well.

programminggeek 12y ago

This is pretty standard advice. You want your blog on the same domain. Subdomains are generally treated not exactly the same as content on the same domain. There are a lot of very good reasons to have your blog on the same domain and relatively few to have it on a subdomain. The extra traffic outweighs any benefit to putting it on a subdomain.

jsm386 12y ago

To paraphrase what b1twise wrote below I would say do not do as Google says when common sense, lots and lots of case studies, and practitioner consensus say otherwise. Sure...you can move it to a subdomain and if all goes well, great. If not you can cite a Matt Cutts video to say who could have known: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MswMYk05tk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MswMYk05tk If the organic traffic matters then trust people who are actually affected (http://moz.com/community/q/moz-s-official-stance-on-subdomain-vs-subfolder-does-it-need-updating http://moz.com/community/q/moz-s-official-stance-on-subdomai...) and figure out another (yes, much more involved) way to deal like reverse proxying if you have other demands to contend with.

Houshalter 12y ago

It's weird to seeing people obsess over tiny little things just to please an algorithm.

visakanv 12y ago
Although if you think about it, a lot of people obsess over tiny little things just to please: * parents * love interest * fashion * social group In a sense we all do it all the time. "Gaming the system" and what have you.
spacecowboy_lon 12y ago
as the Drifters said "Monney Honney"
tiquortoo 12y ago
An algorithm that is a primary determinate of whether customers find you.
- Houshalter 12y ago
  Yes of course. I'm not saying that it's irrational, just that it's a strange situation.

codexon 12y ago

I moved languages to a subdomain instead of query strings as suggested by a Google website, and my rankings plummeted.

nzealand 12y ago
Did you redirect?
- codexon 12y ago
  yes

franze 12y ago

what's up with all this SEO bullshit on HN in the last few days? and bullshit it is. let's start, i will try to not let this sound too much like a rant, but i can guarantee nothing. let's do a wittgenstein. do not use the word penalty. a penalty is when you look into google webmaster tools (of all your protocol & subdomains & domains variation and you have a message, that you have a penalty. go on, look into https://iwantmyname.com http://iwantmyname.com https://www.iwantmyname. http://www.iwantmyname.com http://blog.iwantmyname.com .. other subdomains .. nothing there? then don't use the world penalty, it has no meaning. this and your mention in your post of the worst bloodsucking (a.k.a. toolselling) "seo" publication ever leads me to the first issue: you are reading SEO blogs! stop it. do not reed SEO blogs, ever. you will reduce your understanding of google as soon as you start reading SEO blogs. there are 400+ specs and recommendations directly by google of what you have to do to perform well in google, read them first. the issue at hand is: you got traffic for your blogpost content before the move, then you moved it to another protocol + subdomain combination, you got less traffic, with no positive trend. this was not the desired traffic behaviour. this was the issue. your hypothesis is that the traffic drop has to do with the move as the is a strong timely correlation. sound sensemaking. first of all, be honest in what you did: you * from a quick view i would say your blog pages are majority of your pages * you changed the URL of the majority of your pages * you changed the subdomain of the majority of your pages * you changed the protocol of the majority of your pages additionally the minority of the pages has only a very poor interlinking to the majority of the pages (only the blog start page is ever linked) additionally the blog content seems to be high quality content, while on the subdomain-less site you seem to have lots of very poor content landing pages (duplicate with a hint of text templates) targeting the different domains suffixes https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aiwantmyname.com+Easy+and+user-friendly+domain+name+management+Simple+setup+for+the+best+web+apps+and+services+Full+ownership+and+DNS+control+over+your+domain+Free+WHOIS+address+masking+to+protect+your+privacy+Fast%2C+friendly+and+personal+customer+support&pws=0&hl=en https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aiwantmyname.com+Easy+... google now has two statements * I) a priori: another protocol/subdomain == another domain independet webproperty * II) google can deal with webproperties split over differnt domains / protocolls if it can determine that they belong together. the big question is now - did google see the new subdomains as part of the iwantmyname.com webproperty. well, let's look at site:iwantmyname.com https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aiwantmyname.com&pws=0&hl=en#q=site:iwantmyname.com&pws=0&hl=en&start=50 https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aiwantmyname.com&pws=0... y google is rewriting their snippet headlines to your pages to have " - iWantMyName" in there. if i do a site:blog.iwantmyname.com" https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ablog.iwantmyname.com&pws=0&hl=en#q=site:blog.iwantmyname.com&pws=0&hl=en&start=10 https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ablog.iwantmyname.com&... i get a lot " - Domain Blog" in the search snippets. why is this, well basically your blog start page link points to the blog start page and has the underlying text "Domain blog" your titles are not as recommended by google (see: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?hl=en#3 https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?hl=en#3 section "brand your titles") the title issue should have been a major warning. we could probably find much more if we would have google webmaster tools access to all the subdomains (protocols) and subdirectories. but the biggest warning was the "we did not regain traffic" issue. but - based on your blog post - the thing you did was, you waited? and well, here we are with the bullshit and SEO blogs topic again where they quite often state, that it "can take a while" whereby they mean an undefined timeframe of 3 to 4 months plus. this is evil. if you do a change and you want to see a positive impact it does not take longer than 2 weeks to see a positive or negative trend. anybody who says something else is just lazy. (note: additionally i could not find any sitemap.xml which well indeed slows down the whole domain migration process, this should have been fixed first and is recommended by google again and again for URL changes and domain moves) so what is the point of this rant: * do not read SEO blogs * do not read SEO blogs * read google specs (in your case: titles, sitemaps, site moves, ..) * don't use the word penalty and maybe, just maybe: if you see a traffic drop and you do not regain your traffic, ask a professional SEO before moving your URLs around again and again. even the worst SEO - after selling you a bloodsucking tool - would have fixed the title, interlinking and probably sitemap issue. or post a thread on the google webmaster forum, actually they are quite helpful there.

netheril96 12y ago

I am a complete noob regarding SEO. My naive interpretation of the drop in rating is that it takes time for Google to rebuild the index. It needs not only the content on your website, but links from other websites and people's clicking habit to determine the ranking. On what level is my interpretation wrong?

blumkvist 12y ago
Google treats subdomains (almost) like completely different sites. Links to the root domain do not count for the subdomain and vice versa.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  AFAIK it treats some common subdomains (e.g. "blog.") as part of the main site.
spacecowboy_lon 12y ago
not any more back in the day (several years ago) it used to take time for google to index a site
- mtbcoder 12y ago
  I think he's referring to domain authority (PageRank) and not just indexing. GoogleBot can hit your site several times a day and index things quickly. Building your domain authority on the other hand and connecting all the dots (like your back-link profile) takes a long time.

huhtenberg 12y ago

Hold on. Are you telling me that the drop of 4K views was entirely attributed to getting fewer hits from Google searches? What happened to the bounce rate?

angrybits 12y ago

At the risk of being slightly off-topic, when looking at the phrase "for better maintainability and performance with GitHub Pages' CDN and future-proofing in case we wanted to switch to a different platform down the road", I do not see a compelling reason for the work expenditure. Unsurprisingly, in solving problems they didn't actually have, they managed to create an entirely new set of problems that they wouldn't have otherwise had. (And the problems they created look to have teeth to boot.) To me, the lesson here is not about SEO, it's about effective management.

mod 12y ago

If the image is correct, then I must be misunderstanding something. If the arrow is where you made you change to blog., what was the penalty? A very, very slight downtick in traffic from July -> August? Maybe you meant to say you made the switch in June?

treitnauer 12y ago
We moved it at the very beginning of July. I made that more clear in the article now. Thanks for pointing that out!
- avalaunch 12y ago
  I just read the article and looked at the image and it's still really unclear. It looks like you lost all your traffic immediately prior to switching to the subdomain and nothing in the article said otherwise.
  - pimlottc 12y ago
    It's not clear exactly how that graph works; if the indicated bullet point represents "total pages views in July" then it would seem to show a decrease in the period starting immediately after the move.
BorisMelnik 12y ago
there are many different types of Google penalties. It doesn't have to be a complete loss of traffic. Sometimes you get bounced back 1 page, other times 3, other times 99 it varies based on the 'offense.' You are correct in stating this was only a slight drop in impressions. In this case I would say this is Googles fuck up. The algorithm is not mature or smart enough to see that the blog was moved.
j_s 12y ago
I agree; also, there is no evidence that restoring to /blog 'fixed' the problem... it's possible they just lost traffic!