How to recover from duplicate subdomain penalty?

[tact]

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!

[tact]

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.

[JaredMumford]

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.

[tact]

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.

[JaredMumford]

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.

[tact]

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.

[JaredMumford]

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).

[benjaminspak]

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.

[SEODinosaur]

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.