Sudden drop in ranks and traffic after migrating community website into main domain

[Amjath]

Hi,

We recently moved our community website (around 50K web pages) to our main domain.

It now resides as a sub-domain on our main website.

e.g. Before -

we had www.mainwebsite.com and www.communitywebsite.com

After -

we have www.communitywebsite.mainwebsite.com

This change took place on July 19th.

After a week, we saw 16% drop in organic traffic to mainwebsite.com.

Our ranks on most of the head keywords including brand keywords have dropped.

We had created 301 redirects from pages on www.communitywebsite.com before this change was made.

Has anybody seen this kind of impact when domains are merged?

Should we expect that within 3-4 weeks Google will be able to re-index and re-rank all the pages?

Is there anything else we could do to rectify the situation?

Any feedback/suggestions are welcome!

[Amjath]

Thanks Ryan!

Yes, our traffic and ranks for the roor domain have dropped after this new sub-domain was added.

[RyanKent]

The hypothesis behind this move was that merging of two websites will increase the authority of main website and improve ranks and traffic.

That could work if you actually merged the two sites. You did not. A subdomain is a separate site. That is why I recommended the /community folder within the main domain.

With respect to your drop in traffic after the move, I understood you were referring to the total traffic across your entire domain. If you are only referring to your root domain, then adding the subdomain should not have impacted your root domain in any manner. I would suggest investigating other possible causes for the drop.

[Amjath]

Thanks Ryan for the detailed reply!

Yes, we have it as a sub-domain i.e. community.mainwebsite.com.

sorry for the typo.

I have a question about this:

"Even if you did everything perfectly, there is some loss of link juice from your redirect which will lead to some of your rankings dropping, which will directly lead to less traffic."

Even though there is loss of link juice from the backlinks that were originally pointing to community.com, how could that affect mainwebsite.com negatively? After all, those are additional links that we are getting after the migration. Number of backlinks to mainwebsite.com actually increased due to moving the community website.

Are we missing anything?

We made this huge change to get SEO benefit as well. The hypothesis behind this move was that merging of two websites will increase the authority of main website and improve ranks and traffic.

What do you think about this?

Thanks again for your help!

[RyanKent]

we have www.communitywebsite.mainwebsite.com

Horrible! If you were to use a subdomain, at least drop the "www".

Your primary domain is "mainwebsite.com". "www" is your first subdomain. "community" would be your second subdomain. If you were going to use a subdomain it would appear much better as "community.mainwebsite.com".

Better still, if your community site directly supports or discusses the same subject as the main site, merge them completely. www.mainsite.com/community.

A 16% drop in organic traffic is not unusual after this type of migration. Even if you did everything perfectly, there is some loss of link juice from your redirect which will lead to some of your rankings dropping, which will directly lead to less traffic. Depending on the nature of your industry, any site can bounce 15% from month-to-month based on many factors such as news, seasons, etc.

Within a month of the move being finalized, you can expect your Google rankings to be fully settled, but you may not regain your old traffic back. A few steps to take:

• make sure every page has been 301'd correctly. Check the old site for any 301 errors, and check the new site to ensure pages are being redirected properly and not simply to the home page.

• update all of your site's internal links to ensure they point to the correct URLs. Do a crawl test

• update all of your signatures, social pages, etc to reflect the new URLs

• contact any sites you have a positive relationship with and request they update any links to your site

Based on what you shared it is not possible to determine if the traffic drop is due to short term variations, items you missed during the move, or may be permanent.