Help! Odd SERP results on two branded terms.

[sderuyter]

We have had the ODDEST thing happen to our Branded search. Last week we started seeing our Women’s subdomain (women.duluthtrading.com) outranking our main Duluth Trading domain (duluthtrading.com) on searches for “duluth trading co” and “duluth trading company”.

Sample of odd results page: http://screencast.com/t/cKgkaYc1

As you can see- our Women's sub domain is ranking #1 then our main domain, THEN what used to be our organic site links are now listing 3-6.

If you search for "duluth trading" though, you will get the typically results page: http://screencast.com/t/qGLDWiM0f

We have been trying to figure out how or why this has happened.

Our website went out for 30 minutes on January 4th. We thought maybe that is what happened but it has now been 7 days.

Any help or suggestions would be great!

[SafeNet_Interactive_Marketing]

I'm not seeing anything obvious, but quick question: Did you do anything new recently with your sitemaps or canonicals?

One thing I noticed is that it looks like you have the same sitemap at http://www.duluthtrading.com/data/framework/sitemap/sitemap.xml and http://women.duluthtrading.com/data/framework/sitemap/sitemap-womens.xml, and they look fairly similar or identical to me. If you have the ability, one thing to try might be making the home page the first entry on http://www.duluthtrading.com/data/framework/sitemap/sitemap.xml and assigning it the highest priority. I'd then limit http://women.duluthtrading.com/data/framework/sitemap/sitemap-womens.xml to just women.duluthtrading.com URLs.

You mentioned that the site went down on January 4th. Can you give us any details on that? What HTTP code were you getting at the time? Etc. Did this start happening after that, or did you notice it before the outage? Did it impact the subdomain as well? (I imagine so, but it doesn't hurt to check). Any other changes you made on the technical side around the time you noticed the change?

There's going to be a better answer than your sitemaps and I'll keep looking, but restructuring them is something that you could try to signal your preference to Google. It's weird that it would impact just queries that include co./company though.

[sderuyter]

Hi There! Thanks for your response!!

I emailed our IT group about the sitemap observation.

The site went down on January 4th. It was only for 30 minutes. We noticed the odd SERP results on Wednesday- January 6th. According to Moz our Keyword rankings for 'duluth trading co" & "duluth trading company" have been all over the place. See here: http://screencast.com/t/Tgc3qZgYrd & http://screencast.com/t/uvgHeRGNy

I also noticed that "https" is showing up and not "http". I'm not sure why that is happening as well...