Search traffic hit after switching magazine to subdomain

[shivaniseos]

Hi there,

I'm fairly new at all of this and would appreciate any help with understanding why our website has taken a hit in traffic. We curate an online magazine, which was previously accessible through: forensicoutreach.com. It was receiving about 2,000+ unique visitors per day up until a week ago, when we changed a few things.

However, the magazine doesn't reflect what our business does, so we created a product-focused web presence on forensicoutreach.com, and moved the magazine (which everyone loved) to library.forensicoutreach.com (DA 37, PA 1).

We thought separating the properties was a good idea, but now I'm not so sure. Our traffic on library.forensicoutreach.com is 1,500 (so 500 less than usual!) and our main property has about 56 unique visits a day. It's pretty substantial.

A few questions:

1. If we move the library to forensicoutreach.com/library, will that make any difference?

2. Where did we go wrong here and how can we fix it?

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

[shivaniseos]

Thanks -- this was indeed the issue. Appreciate your help.

[shivaniseos]

Thanks very much for your response. I've changed it back to the subfolder setting and we've regained our lost traffic. Amazing!

[KaneJamison]

If your audience is the same as the audience for your business, I'd highly advocate keeping this in a subfolder like /library/ rather than a subdomain.

If your audience is different, then I'm not certain why you're doing the magazine, so let's assume that's not the case.

You will see a drop in organic traffic by moving to a subdomain for the reasons covered in the Whiteboard Friday that Dmytro shared. Regardless of whether you leave it on the subdomain or the subfolder, you'll need to create proper 301 redirects as Eric mentioned.

Please let us know if you have questions on that process, but to clearly answer the question of "If we move the library to forensicoutreach.com/library, will that make any difference?", YES, we recommend doing that /library/ subfolder.

[GlobeRunner]

Whenever you change to a new subdomain, or you change domains, you'll need to tell Google that you're doing it. Here's what we recommend:

1. Set up 301 Permanent Redirects from the old URLs to the new URLs. This will forward/redirect users to the new location, including the search engine crawlers.

2. Verify the new location (the new subdomain) in Google Search Console and use the Change of Address Tool to tell Google that you've moved.

3. Update Google Analytics so that it reflects the new URL.

By verifying the site you'll see the traffic in the Google Search Console and Google will recognize that change faster if you use the Change of Address tool.

[solvid]

Hi,

I think what might be causing the traffic drop is the fact that you have moved your library to a submain as oppose to keeping it under the root domain.

Have a look at this whiteboard Friday. https://moz.com/blog/subdomains-vs-subfolders-rel-canonical-vs-301-how-to-structure-links-optimally-for-seo-whiteboard-friday

This should give you some heads up.