SEO penalties of moving our blog to a subdomain
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SEO penalties of moving our blog to a subdomain
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Re: SEO penalties of moving our blog to a subdomain
#2If 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?
Re: SEO penalties of moving our blog to a subdomain
#3If 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?
We moved it at the very beginning of July. I made that more clear in the article now. Thanks for pointing that out!
Re: SEO penalties of moving our blog to a subdomain
#4Yeah, 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.
Re: SEO penalties of moving our blog to a subdomain
#5If 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?
We moved it at the very beginning of July. I made that more clear in the article now. Thanks for pointing that out!
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.
Re: SEO penalties of moving our blog to a subdomain
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
We moved it at the very beginning of July. I made that more clear in the article now. Thanks for pointing that out!
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.
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.
Re: SEO penalties of moving our blog to a subdomain
#7My 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.
Re: SEO penalties of moving our blog to a subdomain
#8As 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 :)
Re: SEO penalties of moving our blog to a subdomain
#9My 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.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).
Re: SEO penalties of moving our blog to a subdomain
#10This 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.