Pages are almost invisible when moving from www. subdomain to forum. subdomain with 301 redirect

We recently migrated our site to discourse, and per recommendations moved our pages/topics to a subdomain, forum.mamapedia.com

Unfortunately, so far, the pages are now nearly invisible in google, with no sign of recovery.

I’ve posted a thread in google webmaster forum on the topic here:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/thread/317727551?hl=en&sjid=5086585817663368142-NA

However I will post the full body here in case anyone has any suggestions or experience with this:

We recently did a move of our core pages (on our forum) from the root domain, www.mamapedia.com, to a subdomain, forum.mamapedia.com. Initially there appeared to be no issue, we did the standard 301 redirects. Then, after a week or two traffic plummeted, essentially to zero. It’s not going on week and no signals of any recovery.

This is confusing, as google professes that a subdomain is ‘the same’ as a root domain so why did we get disappeared?

What’s more interesting in there are relic pages still on the root domain that are doing well, if anything slightly improving indicating this is not related to any core update, but specific to the moving from the root to the subdomain.

Any help would be appreciated.

Here is the activity on the subdomain, where the majority for our pages now live:

Here is the activity on the root domain, effectively the same:

That sucks Jacob!

Can you share an example of an old link that redirects?

And checking, you did two things in one go right?

  1. Move from a different forum software (which one) to Discourse and
  2. Move from a subfolder to a subdomain
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Also, when you say “completely invisible” you mean that they rank low right?
Because they certainly are visible on google:
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aforum.mamapedia.com

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@Bas thanks for the response!

  1. Move from a different forum software (which one) to Discourse and

Yes, and a custom rails application

  1. Move from a subfolder to a subdomain

Yes

The pages are not ‘completely invisible’, you are right, I updated the title of the post. But they are for all practical purposes invisible to regular users (who don’t use the site: operator to find them :slight_smile:

Here are some example of pages still on the old format, the subdirectory, you can see them with the /article/ - which redirect to forum.mamapedia.com

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amamapedia.com%2Farticle%2F+stroller&sca_esv=62c7954774bbe2d8&sxsrf=ADLYWIK7hmuW9k4uTlkCooI-qsnJvczaAg%3A1736440130715&ei=Qvl_Z9anK5io5NoPvoO_YA&ved=0ahUKEwjW0KjJh-mKAxUYFFkFHb7BDwwQ4dUDCBA&uact=5&oq=site%3Amamapedia.com%2Farticle%2F+stroller&gs_lp=Egxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAiJHNpdGU6bWFtYXBlZGlhLmNvbS9hcnRpY2xlLyBzdHJvbGxlckigHFCrClj4F3ABeACQAQCYAX6gAfoEqgEDNS40uAEDyAEA-AEBmAIAoAIAmAMAiAYBkgcAoAeVAw&sclient=gws-wiz-serp

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Note that www.mamapedia.com is not the root domain - mamapedia.com is.

It looks like you had the same content on both cdn. and www. - is it possible you are/were penalised for that?

I might start by reviewing your web logs for Google crawls and ensure that everything looks correct?

(I am not an SEO person, so beyond that and the usual advice I see about checking the Google Webmaster Console for errors, sorry, no other ideas)

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Thanks for the response @supermathie !

Note that www.mamapedia.com is not the root domain - mamapedia.com is.

Thanks for pointing that out, yes that’s correct.

It looks like you had the same content on both cdn. and www. - is it possible you are/were penalised for that?

No, fortunately we were not penalized for that. Additionally, cdn. is also redirected with a 301 status to the new location at forum.mamapedia.com.

Web crawling is the same as it was prior to the move, roughly 10k pages a day, no change there. No other obvious errors in web console, no manual actions etc.

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A few observations, but nothing super actionable unfortunately. You would probably do well to engage an SEO specialist.

  1. It’s a fairly recent move, so things might just need some time
  2. Looking at your charts, somehow the total traffic (which is what I’m assuming is the second chart) seems to be very steady, which is very strange if you’ve just moved a significant chunk of content away from that total.
  3. The content is in the new index, including fairly old topics. So the indexing isn’t the issue.
  4. The old content is still in the google index, which is sort of surprising, but might be due to reason #1
  5. Could this just be an issue with the search console? Do you also see a decline in e.g. visits and users posting?
  6. There isn’t a lot of activity. Looking at /latest there is no content in e.g. October. Are you sure that all relevant content is accessible to google?
  7. Did you modify your robots.txt in any way? if so, consider reversing that to defaults
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@Bas thanks for the response. To your points…

  1. It’s a fairly recent move, so things might just need some time

Potentially, in some ways this would be good news, I guess the question would be only google knows, how long?

  1. Looking at your charts, somehow the total traffic (which is what I’m assuming is the second chart) seems to be very steady, which is very strange if you’ve just moved a significant chunk of content away from that total.

Sorry, the second chart is just the root domain, split out from the subdomain a few days after the move. It’s not really worth going into but to your point, the traffic, visibility of any urls on the root domain remain unchanged, intact. The fall off is all isolated to forum.mamapedia.com traffic

  1. The content is in the new index, including fairly old topics. So the indexing isn’t the issue.

Yes, it appears to be fully indexed on the forum.mamapedia.com, no issues with seeing, reading, and indexing the pages.

  1. The old content is still in the google index, which is sort of surprising, but might be due to reason #1

Yes, it’s hanging around quite sometime now, a good 8 weeks at this point (at least)

  1. Could this just be an issue with the search console? Do you also see a decline in e.g. visits and users posting?

No, analytics shows the same decrease

  1. There isn’t a lot of activity. Looking at /latest there is no content in e.g. October. Are you sure that all relevant content is accessible to google?

Yes all content is accessible

  1. Did you modify your robots.txt in any way? if so, consider reversing that to defaults

It’s the default discourse robots.txt file

Hey Jacob,

I’m at a bit of a loss unfortunately. As said above, I would advise you to engage an SEO specialist

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That makes two of us @Bas - it’s clear Google has somehow penalized the new subdomian despite the 301 implementation.

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Update here.

Our original domain, www.mamapedia.com continues to steadily pick up volume, stay consistent and deliver traffic on the original url’s still in the google index.

The domain we moved to, forum.mamapedia.com, continue to decline in activity, with a handful of impressions a day, and it appears now the pages are slowing leaving the index, as we can see here:

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aforum.mamapedia.com

We now have 4 pages indexed (at least according to this directive).

Hopefully this turns around at some point, we are going on 9 weeks now and so far moving to a new subdomain has been a failure.

Let’s see if it turns around…

Just an update here, no change, still the subdomain we moved to, forum.mamapedia.com is virtually invisible, I would argue in some penalized state while the originating domain www.mamapedia.com slowly improves in rank and positioning.

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