Odd Results Moving Subdomain Content onto Main Domain

[Travis-W]

Hi forum!

On Thursday night (12/6/12) we moved a page (and all the linking product pages) from our subdomain, mailing-list.consumerbase.com, to our main domain, www.consumerbase.com/mailing-lists.html

Shockingly, today I search for "mailing lists" (our #1 target keyword) and we're on the first page! This page never has not ranked well for this keyword in the past. The problem is, the link displaying on Google is our old mailing-list.consumerbase.com subdomain URL.

Did moving this content from the new subdomain to our old, well-established domain cause it to appear better in search? Or, since the URL is on the subdomain, did Google just finally get around to indexing that page? Thanks!

[Horizon]

Hi Zora,

In my experience, it is easier to rank well for a subfolder than it is for a subdomain. With a subdomain, you are mostly leaving it to rank for itself, and it will need almost as much SEO as your root domain. With a subfolder, it seems that more link juice is passed down the line from the root, so it is much easier to rank. Again - this is just from my experience.

I would say that you should not question why you have suddenly jumped onto page 1, though I suspect it is because you have moved the contents to a subfoler. I would set up a 301 from the subdomain and fingers crossed Google will rank your subfolder in place of the subdomain at it's next crawl.

Cheers

Matt