How to recover from duplicate subdomain penalty?
-
Two and half a weeks ago, my site was slapped with a penalty -- 60% of organic traffic disappeared over 2-3 days.
After investigating we discovered that our site was serving the same content for all subdomains, and Google somehow had two additional subdomains it was crawling and indexing. We solved the issue with 301 redirects to our main site (www) a couple of days after the drop -- about two weeks ago.
Our rankings have not recovered, and the subdomains are still indexed per Webmaster Tools. Yesterday we submitted a Reconsideration Request. Will that help? Is there any other way to speed up the process of lifting the penalty?
This is the site: http://goo.gl/3DCbl
Thank you!
-
No recovery yet. Quick update... I put in a reconsideration request and was denied, saying No Manual Spam Actions found.
From WMT: The Total Crawled count on the bad subdomains is steady, and there are still no Removed pages, but the Not Selected count is steadily increasing--in fact the total of Indexed and Not Selected is greater than the Total Crawled count -- how does this make sense?
Thanks.
-
Oh - if the subdomains showed no pages indexed, and then all of a sudden at the exact time you dropped, the subdomains showed thousands of indexed pages, then you can definitely assume they are related.
I didnt realize there was such a clear correlation. The suggestions above still stand - you might want to go one further and simply add a noindex right in the robots.txt on those subdomains (make sure its on the subdomains and not the money site!).
Dont forget in WMT you can also do a change of address under Configuration. Youve already completed the first two steps, so you can simply tell Google exactly where the subs have moved.
There's no reason at all why these steps will not prompt google to de-index the subs. The links by the way are simply a 'nudge' to get Google to look at the subdomains again and 'discover' the changes.
-
We'll give the links a shot.
We did consider that the high number of similar static pages may be viewed negatively by Google, but we were ranking very well on many long tail searches before the drop. On WMT, the subdomains show no pages indexed until the exact date range that our rankings dropped, when they spike to the tens of thousands.
What do you think is the likelihood that the subdomains are the culprit in this case?
Thanks for all of your help.
-
Its definitely hard to say with that many URLs - I would definitely point a few at the sub's home page however. It could be that those sub-domains were cached at such long intervals, that Google simply hasn't checked the site again.
Sometimes, adding the sub to WMT, then submitting an xml sitemap, waiting until Google acknowledges it (and tells you how many are indexed) then removing the sitemap can help.
If and when the subdomains are de-indexed (and theres no reason to believe they wouldn't be), then watch your positioning for a week or two after - if it doesnt change, you have to consider that the drop in positioning may be from another cause. For example, the way that each sorting variable for the products lands on its own static page can be viewed as good for SEO but slightly risky since so many pages are so close to duplicated.
-
Thanks Jared. The subdomains are www.ww and www.lnirfrx. We configured all subdomans to 301 to www. We did not receive any messages in WMT -- just the sudden drop ranking.
I'm thinking about putting some links on a forum that I know doesn't have nofollows and is crawled several times a day. But we have tens of thousands of these subdomain pages indexed, will posting a couple of the links help? I wouldn't want to post more than that because it would look spammy.
-
Hi tact - what were your subdomains?
You mentioned that you sent in a Recon. Request - did you receive an unnatural links penalty in WMT?
If you have properly 301'd your subs so that NO subdomain page can be accessed, then by simply pointing a few links at the redirect like Ben said should help it de-index faster. Make sure though that the 301's are properly set up (do a header check) and also make sure that no content from the sub is available unless you are certain the the redirect is applied properly (clear the subdomain of files).
-
Do some guest blogging and point links at your 301s from your guest posts. Google will see that you mean business. You'll have new links and the old pages will be deindexed quicker.
-
I would submit a sitemap and keep moving forward with creating valuable content and sharing it to the right people. It can take Google a long time to get to your message.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google Penalty and Adwords
Hi guys, I am wondering if the google manual penalty or penalty in general (because of bad backlink profile) also means that your website is blocked for Adwords? Thanks
Technical SEO | | barobijav0 -
Purchasing duplicate content
Morning all, I have a client who is planning to expand their product range (online dictionary sites) to new markets and are considering the acquisition of data sets from low ranked competitors to supplement their own original data. They are quite large content sets and would mean a very high percentage of the site (hosted on a new sub domain) would be made up of duplicate content. Just to clarify, the competitor's content would stay online as well. I need to lay out the pros and cons of taking this approach so that they can move forward knowing the full facts. As I see it, this approach would mean forgoing ranking for most of the site and would need a heavy dose of original content as well as supplementing the data on page to build around the data. My main concern would be that launching with this level of duplicate data would end up damaging the authority of the site and subsequently the overall domain. I'd love to hear your thoughts!
Technical SEO | | BackPack851 -
Resolving duplication
example: i have a travel guide domain which will relate to 4 other rental sites (all different domains) if I want to post an article on the main site and as well on one of the other sites, how can this be done in order to not be considered duplicate content as it is authorised buy the author to be in both sites. Original author post on main site. Thanks for the advice in advance, Steve
Technical SEO | | AkilarOffice0 -
Duplicate Pages , Do they matter ?
I have been told buy the company who created my site that duplicate page warning are not a problem ? my site is small and only has 50 pages ( including product pages etc ) yet the crawl shows over 6500 duplicate pages am I right to be concerned?
Technical SEO | | Gardening4you0 -
Do I have a chance to recover from penguin?
Hello All, I am an internet retailer www.giftbasket4kids.com hit by Penguin and have made many changes to my site since first being hit on May 2011. It seems I lost my ranking in some keywords on the two following landing pages. I am OK on my other keywords /landing pages. http://www.giftbasket4kids.com/shop-by-category/gift-basket.html keyword “Gift Basket Ideas” http://www.giftbasket4kids.com/pages/birthday-gifts.html Keywords “Birthday gift for kids, boys, Girls, Children” it seems all keyword that includes “Gift, Gifts” and “birthday”. Note: sometime most of the lost keywords come to 2<sup>nd</sup> page for a day or two then they disappear again I received a Google notice first week of August that there are unnatural links pointing to my site. There was couple of paid banner advertising. I stopped the links and request reconsideration. A week later I got response that there are still unnatural link pointing to the site. I request for reconsideration again and asked Google to let me know which links are in question.it is over 3 weeks I did not get answer yet as I suspected. I have optimized most of my product (80 fresh content well optimized product pages) and added a lot new content. I am making links differently. I am using Squidoo lens to promote my products. I do not know what else I can do. I have been told maybe I should restart new site! All my other keywords are ok . I do not want to start over. Can I make new landing pages and promote them? Would it work or the site is penalized for those keywords? I appreciate your advice in advance. If anyone knows of recoveries of a site like mine? I am looking for an SEO who has experience with relates to sites like mine. Do I have a chance to recover from penguin?
Technical SEO | | giftbasket4kids0 -
Duplicate content - Quickest way to recover?
We've recently been approached by a new client who's had a 60%+ drop in organic traffic. One of the major issues we found was around 60k+ pages of content duplicated across 3 seperate domains. After much discussion and negotiation with them; we 301'd all the pages across to the best domain but traffic is increasing very slowly. Given that the old sites are 60k+ pages each and don't get crawled very often, is it best to notify the domain change through Google Webmaster Tools to try and give Google a 'nudge' to deindex the old pages and hopefully recover from the traffic loss as quickly and as much as possible?
Technical SEO | | Nathan.Smith0 -
Bandcamp subdomain
I have a website - www.weddingmusicproject.com that is doing quite well. However, we have all of the actual music listed on weddingmusicproject.bandcamp.com and have a number of very powerful pages there (bandcamp is a great product by the way). Is there a strong benefit to our domain's authority if we move our "bandcamp" site onto our own subdomain using their custom domain option - http://bandcamp.com/faq_custom_domains - Something like music.weddingmusicproject.com. I seem to think that it would increase our overall domain authority, but it wouldn't increase the number of inbound links or anything. If anything it would decrease the number of linking domains and bandcamp is quite a powerful site so those links would just turn into internal links. Thoughts? I know this is probably a basic concept, but I've thought it over a number of times and can't come to a conclusion.
Technical SEO | | deyobr0 -
Duplicate content, Original source?
Hi there, say i have two websites with identicle content. website a had content on before website b - so will be seen as the original source? If the content was intended for website b, would taking it off a then make the orinal source to google then go to website b? I want website b to get the value of the content but it was put on website a first - would taking it off website a then give website b the full power of the content? Any help of advice much appreciated. Kind Regards,
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0