301 Redirected url to new subdomain, now the rank appears to be completely gone...

[Thomas_m_walker]

In an attempt to not feel bad for not blogging, I set up a new subdomain on my site to have a "coming soon" style page and "best of" section for my blog and video show properties. All the pages on the relaunch subdomain are done in Unbounce.

http://relaunch.tommy.ismy.name

The idea was that I would then take the pages on my regular domain, and one by one create landing pages that test out new design ideas (instead of going into full production web design) and redirect the traffic from the top ranked pages to the new, redesigned pages.

At first, I set up the 301 through a plugin in wordpress and for the first week or so it was great. As far as I know, I did set my canonical tags up properly on that page too. However, just a couple days ago, I wasn't getting the same traffic, and my top ranked keyword that accounts for over half my traffic is nowhere to be found in at least the first 15 pages of search results.

Which stinks, because I've maintained that rank for well over 2 years

Clearly, something I did wasn't liked by Google, and I wonder, what did I do "wrong" and is there anything I could do to get that rank back?

[inlinear]

Hi Thomas,

301 Redirects Do Not Pass Full PageRank & Link Value. Thats what I know. Also http://seomoz.org/ was redirected to http://moz.com and just has a PR of 2.

Please see this Interview with Matt Cutts about this question: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/021832.html Also see this Matt Cutts Video from february this year: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Filv4pP-1nw&feature=player_embedded#at=21

hope this helps,
best regards,
Holger

[MiamiWebCompany]

Yes you can get your rankings back. Here is a blog post of an experiment we did on this exact same scenario. http://miamiwebcompany.com/blog/study-website-recover-from-a-bad-301-redirect

[Everett]

Tommy,

If you completely dropped to nowhere for a phrase you ranked well for it may be more than just a little bit of pagerank lost through the redirect. What Holger says is true, but the amount lost is pretty insignificant.

If you share the exact URLs (before and after) we may be able to look into it for you. The way your domain is set up with multiple nested subdomains could be causing an issue too. The more specific you can be (keywords, etc...) the easier it will be for people to give you relevant advise.