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.
SEO penalties of moving our blog to a subdomain
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Re: SEO penalties of moving our blog to a subdomain
#12This 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.
Re: SEO penalties of moving our blog to a subdomain
#13To 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
If the organic traffic matters then trust people who are actually affected (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.
Re: SEO penalties of moving our blog to a subdomain
#14As 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…
> 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.
Re: SEO penalties of moving our blog to a subdomain
#15If 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?
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.
Re: SEO penalties of moving our blog to a subdomain
#16My 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.
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.…
Instead of 404, wouldn't it be better to 301 or 302?
Re: SEO penalties of moving our blog to a subdomain
#17My 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.
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.…
> 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
> Actually most of those 100 are the same few pages
You could redirect them all to the canonical location for those pages.
Re: SEO penalties of moving our blog to a subdomain
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
> 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 > Actually most of those 100 are the same few pages You could redirect them all to the canonical location for those pages.
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.
Re: SEO penalties of moving our blog to a subdomain
#19As 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…
> 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…
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.
Re: SEO penalties of moving our blog to a subdomain
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
Instead of 404, wouldn't it be better to 301 or 302?
or 410 Gone if the content doesn't live at a new location.