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:
Move from a different forum software (which one) to Discourse and
Yes, and a custom rails application
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
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
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.
