SEO penalties of moving our blog to a subdomain

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

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.

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+...

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... 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&... 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 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.

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?

wow who moved your chease I have seen obvious penalty's on major properties (global 500 publisher) that had no message in GWT.