Massive drop in rankings alert!

[EGOL]

but they now have many more pages being indexed by Google.

This is a comment that caught my attention but is not obvious during a quick look at the website.  Adding a lot of new pages can alter the ranking ability of the site.  If there is a really lot of pages and their quality is low, that can cause a Panda or other problem that can tank the rankings of the entire site.

[SeoSheikh]

Instead of the old subdomains, I created landing subfolder pages or "micro sites " which the sub domains are forwarded to. Then each micro site will have pages added to them to assist with local targeting such as testimonials, directions etc.

[EGOL]

Are these "micro sites" on different domains?

[SeoSheikh]

Thanks Robert, I think I will try reverting with some of them. I completely agree with you that we are ALL experimenting with our SEO efforts. There's so many SEOers that recommend switching from sub domains to sub directories, this is why I made the change.

Thanks for your detailed input.

[SeoSheikh]

No, they're just sub pages. So maindomain.com/uk/cityname1 etc...

[SeoSheikh]

See graph of indexed pages...

indexed-pages.png

[SeoSheikh]

You can see the changes in position almost switch over night. I honestly think that this is the best format for future roofing the website though. The old one was a completed mess, with very poor site navigation and architecture.

the-drop.png

[RobertFisher]

Personally, I am fully confused at what you have done. I suggest you slow down a minute and let's clarify what you had, what was done, and appropriate next moves. 
You said you created subfolders in one place which would be mysite.com/subdirectory/page-for-something.

Now you are saying you created micro sites? which would be microsite.com/page-for-something

What did you have first and what change did you make?

[SeoSheikh]

Apologies Robert. The owner of the company still calls the subfolder pages "Microsites" and it appears it has stuck in my brain!!!

There are no microsites, just subfolders (maincompany.com/uk/city-location/ which used to be the subdomains to house each major city franchise of the company. Back then when it was all subdomains (city-location.maincompany.com) had masses amounts of duplicate content as they had basically a Wordpress multisite and just duplicated each website but changed its target city keyword.

Am I making any sense here at all? Basically, it's all in an orderly fashion NOW, but the rankings have dropped.

[BradsDeals]

After reading through this entire thread, my big question is if the content for each city is still roughly the same thing or if all of them are substantially different after the move to subfolders. Because I agree that moving content off subdomains into subfolders SHOULD generally be a positive move... unless all of those subdomains were essentially identical, in which case you've just handed your root domain a big duplicate content issue.

[SeoSheikh]

Hi Rebecca,

Yes the content on each city is unique (not great, but unique). When they were on subdomains they were absolute replicas of each other apart from city name switches and maybe some short intro text, but other than that, complete copies.

Now those old subdomains get forwarded on to each new subfolder page so;

city-location.maincompany.com gets forwarded to maincompany.com/uk/city-location/

Alex