
SEO penalties of moving our blog to a subdomain - chriswrites
https://iwantmyname.com/blog/2015/01/seo-penalties-of-moving-our-blog-to-a-subdomain.html
======
b1twise
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.

------
jsm386
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-
subdomai...](http://moz.com/community/q/moz-s-official-stance-on-subdomain-vs-
subfolder-does-it-need-updating)) and figure out another (yes, much more
involved) way to deal like reverse proxying if you have other demands to
contend with.

------
rrggrr
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
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).

~~~
JoshTriplett
> 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
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.

------
mod
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
We moved it at the very beginning of July. I made that more clear in the
article now. Thanks for pointing that out!

~~~
avalaunch
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
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.

------
angrybits
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.

------
ericclemmons
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
> 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
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.

------
josephjrobison
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.

------
yesimahuman
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.

------
programminggeek
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.

------
netheril96
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?

~~~
spacecowboy_lon
not any more back in the day (several years ago) it used to take time for
google to index a site

~~~
mtbcoder
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.

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

~~~
tiquortoo
An algorithm that is a primary determinate of whether customers find you.

~~~
Houshalter
Yes of course. I'm not saying that it's irrational, just that it's a strange
situation.

------
huhtenberg
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?

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

~~~
nzealand
Did you redirect?

~~~
codexon
yes

------
franze
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+...](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)

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...](https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aiwantmyname.com&pws=0&hl=en#q=site:iwantmyname.com&pws=0&hl=en&start=50)
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&...](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)
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.

~~~
facepalm
Any other comments on Moz? I thought their reputation was pretty good?

~~~
franze
google has 400+ recommendations (specs, recommendations, posts) about what you
have to do to perform well in google. without even counting schema.org or
other initiatives.

(google) analytics is an unbelievable powerful tool that has at some companies
whole teams dedicated to it

google webmaster tools is a unbelievable powerful tool that tells you 80% of
everything that is wrong with your site. you can easily make it your half time
job to use this tool to the fullest.

google is part of the triangle: your webproperty, the users, google search

your ressources are better invested into these three areas (analytics,
webmaster tools, google recommendations) than in a third party with its own
interest i.e.: selling tools

~~~
anon1385
>a third party with its own interest

You say that as if Google don't have their own interests: encouraging more
people to spend on Adwords, sending more clicks to sites using Adsense,
sending more clicks to their own properties, encouraging more people to use
Google Analytics.

Google don't want to send traffic to your site, they want to sell ads.

