Large Site - Advice on Subdomaining

[loopyal]

I have a large news site - over 1 million pages (have already deleted 1.5 million)

Google buries many of our pages, I'm ready to try subdomaining http://bit.ly/dczF5y

There are two types of content - news from our contributors, and press releases.

We have had contracts with the big press release companies going back to 2004/5. They push releases to us by FTP or we pull from their server. These are then processed and published. It has taken me almost 18 months, but I have found and deleted or fixed all the duplicates I can find.

There are now two duplicate checking systems in place. One runs at the time the release comes in and handles most of them. The other one runs every night after midnight and finds a few, which are then handled manually. This helps fine-tune the real-time checker.

Businesses often link to their release on the site because they like us. Sometimes google likes this, sometimes not.

The news we process is reviews by 1,2 or 3 editors before publishing. Some of the stories are 100% unique to us. Some are from contributors who also contribute to other news sites.

Our search traffic is down by 80%. This has almost destroyed us, but I don't give up easily. As I said, I've done a lot of projects to try to fix this. Not one of them has done any good, so there is something google doesn't like and I haven't yet worked it out. A lot of people have looked and given me their ideas, and I've tried them - zero effect.

Here is an interesting and possibly important piece of information:

Most of our pages are "buried" by google. If I dear, even for a headline, even if it is unique to us, quite often the page containing that will not appear in the SERP. The front page may show up, an index page may show up, another strong page pay show up, if that headline is in the top 10 stories for the day, but the page itself may not show up at all - UNTIL I go to the end of the results and redo the search with the "duplicates" included. Then it will usually show up, on the front page, often in position #2 or #3

According to google, there are no manual actions against us. There are also no notices in WMT that say there is a problem that we haven't fixed.

You may tell me just delete all of the PRs - but those are there for business readers, as they always have been. Google supposedly wants us to build websites for readers, which we have always done, What they really mean is - build it the way we want you to do it, because we know best.

What really peeves me is that there are other sites, that they consistently rank above us, that have all the same content as us, and seem to be 100% aggregators, with ads, with nothing really redeeming them as being different, so this is (I think) inconsistent, confusing and it doesn't help me work out what to do next.

Another thing we have is about 7,000+ US military stories, all the way back to 2005. We were one of the few news sites supporting the troops when it wasn't fashionable to do so. They were emailing the stories to us directly, most with photos. We published every one of them, and we still do. I'm not going to throw them under the bus, no matter what happens.

There were some duplicates, some due to screwups because we had multiple editors who didn't see that a story was already published. Also at one time, a system code race condition - entirely my fault, I am the programmer as well as the editor-in-chief. I believe I have fixed them all with redirects.

I haven't sent in a reconsideration for 14 months, since they said "No manual spam actions found" - I don't see any point, unless you know something I don't.

So, having exhausted all of the things I can think of, I'm down to my last two ideas.

1. Split all of the PRs off into subdomains (I'm ready to pull the trigger later this week)

2. Do what the other sites do, that I believe create little value, which is show only a headline and snippet and some related info and link back to the original page on the PR provider website. (I really don't want to do this)

3. Give up on the PRs and delete them all and lose another 50% of the income, which means releasing our remaining staff and upsetting all of the companies and people who linked to us. (Or find them all and rewrite them as stories - tens of thousands of them) and also throw all our alliances under the bus (I really don't want to do this)

There is no guarantee this is the problem, but google won't tell me, the google forums are crap, and nobody else has given me an idea that has helped.

My thought is that splitting them off into subdomains will have a number of effects.

1. Take most of the syndicated content onto subdomains, so its not on the main domain.

2. Shake up the Domain Authority

3. Create a million 301 redirects.

4. Make it obvious to the crawlers what is our news and what is PRs

5. make it easier for Google News to understand

Here is what I plan to do

1. redirect all PRs to their own subdomain.

pn.domain.com for PRNewswire releases

bw.domain.com for Businesswire releases

etc

2. Fix all references so they use the new subdomain

Here are my questions - and I hope you may see something I haven't considered.

1. Do you have any experience of doing this?

2. What was the result

3. Any tips?

4. Should I put PR index pages on the subdomains too? I was originally planning to keep them on the main domain, with the individual page links pointing to the actual release on the subdomain. Obviously, I want them only in one place, but there are two types of these index pages.

a) all of the releases for a particular PR company - these certainly could be on the subdomain and not on the main domain

b) Various category index pages - agriculture, supermarkets, mining etc These would have to stay on the main domain because they are a mixture of different PR providers.

5. Is this a bad idea?

I'm almost out of ideas. Should I add a condensed list of everything I've done already?

If you are still reading, thanks for hanging in.

[EGOL]

I am ready to shout "NO" anytime I see anyone talking about using a subdomain... but you have made me consider it.

I have a site (not nearly as large as yours) that has a lot of press releases given to us by government agencies and industry sites.  (These are not SEO press releases, they are from people who have a message to get out.)  For a few years these were about 2/3 of the content that we published. They ranked really well - often above the original source and we added a bit of unique commentary to each of them.

In October '11 we took a Panda hit.  Fortunately we simply dropped a couple positions on tons of pages - not a huge loss like some people see.

To escape we did noindex / follow to the most popular releases and threw the rest overboard.   That cut off search traffic (which hit our income) but kept the content on our site for visitors.  Google rankings returned partially a couple months later and then a couple months after that everything was back to normal - but income was down a little.

After reading your post, I am thinking about starting a subdomain for these press releases.  Hopefully that will isolate the main site from any damage that the duplicate content might cause and allow them to pull a little traffic from search.

About "index pages"....  If I do this I will keep them on my main site because most of my content is there (my own unique content).  Since Panda I have become highly selective about which press releases I publish and they are now a minority of new content.

Thanks for the idea.

Good luck with your site.