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Again, the thing is that the client has made the decision and he definitely wants to do this. I'm not planning to fight it any further as I've already explained to him the difficulties and he appreciates them and has made the decision to do it anyway.

The new site won't be exactly the same, but it will have broadly the same set of products, albeit described in a very different way.

The situation is undoubtedly difficult and undesirable, that's for sure. But the client has made a business decision and now we have to find the best way through it.

I appreciate the time you've put in to such a detailed reply, however I'm not questioning the client's business decision and I don't plan to.  My question was not whether it is a good idea or not - that really doesn't matter as the decision is already made - but more to start a discussion around the best action plan from this point forward.

There won't actually be any redirecting involved, because what the plan is essentially is to make a new website with all the same products on as the original site, but worded completely differently for the wider market. The existing website will stay in place as-is, with the original domain and all the original content.

A client has an existing successful website that sells niche products - they are well known in their marketplace. They have two sets of key customers, let's call them (a) and (b), that need addressing in different ways to maximise sales. (a) is the more specialist end of the market, where people have complex needs - there are fewer of them but repeat business is likely, and we can talk to them in more technical language. (b) is the layman's end of the market - there is a vast pool of potential customers but they'll be more casual buyers and need to be addressed more in layman's terms.

So what they want to do is to take their existing website, and essentially split it into two different websites, one for each market. The one that will use the existing domain, with all the links that have built up over the years pointing to it, will be the site for the more specialist end of the market (a). The domain name suits it better, which is why he wants to use the existing domain with that site and not the other.

(b) will be a brand new domain. The client will write new product descriptions across the board so that the two sets of product information are not duplicate.

I'd rather he didn't do this at all, because of the risk involved, and the difficulty of building up the traffic to the new site, which is after all the one with the best chance of mass market sales. But given that the client has decided that this is definitely what he wants, does anyone have any thoughts on what the action plan should be?

In light of the Penguin update a few months back, are you still disavowing links?

Penguin is meant to now ignore spammy links, meaning that manual disavow via Search Console is not needed.

However, the feature stills remains in Search Console, suggesting that it is still helpful (or have Google just not got around to removing it yet?)

Be interesting to hear your thoughts.

Hi Chris,

Thanks for your reply. The issue isn't that Google hasn't indexed those pages, though - it has. I'm not sure what you mean by 'Google won't index huge sites it just doesn't have time', as it clearly does index plenty of huge sites.The site is pretty much fully indexed so it's not that Google can't find the pages.

We have also, of course, tried using the client's Analytics to identify the issue, as you describe, but the client accidentally deleted all the historical data beyond about the six month mark (oops), so I can't do a lot of the analysis I would normally do. I have one or two odd old printouts showing some historical Analytics and ranking data, and their sales data to go on, and this does tend to suggest that organic traffic has indeed dropped off (for reasons other than seasonal ones) and that there has been some decline in their search engine rankings for some key phrases. But I can't tell a lot more than that.

What I'm looking for is to see whether anyone else has had experience of this or a similar issue - whether anyone has seen excessive links between subdomains have a negative impact on rankings & traffic. I've been working in SEO for ten years and never come across anyone who has quite this many links within their own website, so it's not something I've encountered before.

Anyone else out there come across this before?

A client has noticed in recent months that their traffic from organic search has been declining, little by little.

They have a large ecommerce site with several different categories of product - each product type has its own subdomain. They have some big megamenus going on, and the end result is that if you look in their Webmaster Tools for one of their subdomains, under Links to your Site, it says they have nearly 22 million links from their own domain!

Client is wondering if this is what is causing the decline in traffic and wondering whether to change the whole structure of their site.

Interested to hear the thoughts of the community on this one!