Multiple Subdomains, my worst seo mistake. now what should i do?

[wickedsunny1]

Hello Everyone,

I have been running www.designzzz.com from lats 3 years now. and was doing extremely good with a PR 6 and 800K+ traffic monthly, but 6 months ago it started falling and falling badly.. now i am down to 350K total impressions :{ per month.

I have been blaming penguin for this and been talking to google reps continously over it. they assured me that my site is not under any type of manual spam etc.

Then i begin think and i realized taht was exactly the time when i launched a few subdomains as sub parts of my site like coding.designzzz.com , wordpress.designzzz.com , photograph.designzzz.com , shop.designzzz.com in the making...

now is the part that i can't undo these subdomains.. what should i do ?

my search traffic is almost killed.

I seriously need insight on this guys :

thanks in advance!

Ayaz

[Devanur-Rafi]

Hey Ayaz,

I can put myself in your shoes as I faced the exact issue few years back and this worked like a charm. I am not sure that the following will work for you too but can be looked at along with other good suggestions that you will get here at SEOMoz.

The only thing that I did was, I re-directed all the sub-domains via 301 to their respective sub-directories on the same domain. For example: abc.example.com 301 to example.com/abc/

Within 3 weeks, I was jumping with joy as I not only re-gained what I lost in organic visits but also the numbers got better by little over 9%.

I had unique and original content on the sub-domains. But, these sub-domains were not attracting much traffic and moreover the traffic to main domain dwindled but when these sub-domains were re-directed via 301 to their respective sub-directories (I created those sub-directories just for this purpose), everything was back to normal with additional traffic. Since then, I have been an advocate of sub-directories over sub-domains for obvious SEO benefits.

By the way, did you move any of your main domain's content to the sub-domains?

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

[MattAntonino]

Rafi has it exactly right - as I would do it.  301 the subdomain to the appropriate page.  Then make sure you resubmit a sitemap and ping all of your pages.  I think you'll be fine after that.  Great post Devanur Rafi.

[wickedsunny1]

Hello,

Thank you so much for the suggestion. as i have wordpress installations in subdomains i am not sure it will be easy to do teh redirect because of paths issues. but yeah i am gona try that.

Some people said that google now treats subdomains as subdirectories so that might not be the issue so i am confused.

About moving content from domain to subdomain , nop not really. subdomains got its own original content.

thanks again.

cheers

[EricPratum30]

Reverse proxy – http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-is-a-reverse-proxy-and-how-can-it-help-my-seo

That should do it for you.

[ThompsonPaul]

There are certain very specific circumstances where Google treats subdomains as part of the main domain for reporting purposes, Ayaz, but as far as SEO is concerned, subdomains pretty much always have to stand alone as separate sites.

Paul

[Devanur-Rafi]

Thanks a lot Matt for those encouraging words.

[Devanur-Rafi]

Hi Ayaz,

As you say that the sub-domains have their own original content, then please go ahead and put a 301 re-direction to the respective sub-directories on the main domain. Everything should be back to normal as per my personal experience goes. IMO, sub-domains can never be considered sub-directories by any search engine as for Google, sub-domains should be created only when the purpose of their creation is thoroughly justified with much needed diversity like a blog or a forum and/or a topic that deserves branching from that of the main domain's.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

[wickedsunny1]

Hello Devanur,

Thank you so much for the insight and pointing me to the right direction.

i did it like you said. please take a look and tell me if everything is fine.

http://coding.designzzz.com is now pointing to http://www.designzzz.com/coding/

http://wordpress.designzzz.com is now pointing to http://www.designzzz.com/wordpress/ ofcourse with 301s .

same goes for all other subdomains :}

I am curious how much time will it take for my traffic to start getting better?

thanks again

[Devanur-Rafi]

No problem my friend. Your re-direction setup works perfectly with an HTTP header status 301. It might take anywhere from 2 to 5 weeks for you to be able to see the effect. Please keep posting the updates in here. I wish you all the very best for all your endeavors.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

[wickedsunny1]

Thank you so much,

ofcourse i will do keep you updated :}

cheers