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
-
Duplicate content
I have one client with two domains, identical products to appear on both domains. How should I handle this?
Technical SEO | | Hazel_Key0 -
Duplicate content through product variants
Hi, Before you shout at me for not searching - I did and there are indeed lots of threads and articles on this problem. I therefore realise that this problem is not exactly new or unique. The situation: I am dealing with a website that has 1 to N (n being between 1 and 6 so far) variants of a product. There are no dropdown for variants. This is not technically possible short of a complete redesign which is not on the table right now. The product variants are also not linked to each other but share about 99% of content (obvious problem here). In the "search all" they show up individually. Each product-variant is a different page, unconnected in backend as well as frontend. The system is quite limited in what can be added and entered - I may have some opportunity to influence on smaller things such as enabling canonicals. In my opinion, the optimal choice would be to retain one page for each product, the base variant, and then add dropdowns to select extras/other variants. As that is not possible, I feel that the best solution is to canonicalise all versions to one version (either base variant or best-selling product?) and to offer customers a list at each product giving him a direct path to the other variants of the product. I'd be thankful for opinions, advice or showing completely new approaches I have not even thought of! Kind Regards, Nico
Technical SEO | | netzkern_AG0 -
Duplicate content on user queries
Our website supports a unique business industry where our users will come to us to look for something very specific (a very specific product name) to find out where they can get it. The problem that we're facing is that the products are constantly changing due to the industry. So, for example, one month, one product might be found on our website, and the next, it might be removed completely... and then might come back again a couple months later. All things that are completely out of our control - and we have no way of receiving any sort of warning when these things might happen. Because of this, we're seeing a lot of duplicate content issues arise... For Example... Product A is not active today... so www.mysite.com/search/productA will return no results... Product B is also not active today... so www.mysite.com/search/productB will also return no results. As per Moz Analytics, these are showing up as duplicate content because both pages indicate "No results were found for {your searched term}." Unfortunately, it's a bit difficult to return a 204 in these situations (which I don't know if a 204 would help anyway) or a 404, because, for a faster user experience, we simultaneously render different sections of the page... so in the very beginning of the page load - we start rendering the faster content (template type of content) that says "returning 200 code, we got the query successfully & we're loading the page".. the unique content results finish loading last since they take the longest. I'm still very new to the SEO world, so would greatly appreciate any ideas or suggestions that might help with this... I'm stuck. 😛 Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | SFMoz0 -
Link from Blogspot.com subdomain...
I have found an author that has an article about a particular product we sell online. I was thinking of speaking to them about getting a link to our site. But then I looked at the stats: <label>Page:</label><label id="Page Authority" class="key lsdata">PA:1</label><label id="mozrank" class="key lsdata" title="MozRank">mR:0.00</label>mT:0.00<label id="SEOmoz-data-uid">0</label> links from
Technical SEO | | bjs2010
<label id="SEOmoz-data-uipl">0</label> Root Domains<label>Root Domain:</label>**<label id="dom-pageauthority" class="key lsdata" title="Domain Authority">DA: 59</label>**24,797,212 links from
<label id="SEOmoz-data-pid">110,858</label> Domains<label>Subdomain:</label>Its on a subdomain of blogspot.com - and the page is relevant to a particular category and our e-commerce site.Is it worth pursuing the link?Thanks!0 -
Duplicate Titles Aren't Actually Duplicate
I am seeing duplicate title errors, but when I go to fix the problem, the titles are not actually identical. Any advice? Becky
Technical SEO | | Becky_Converge0 -
Dealing with duplicate content
Manufacturer product website (product.com) has an associated direct online store (buyproduct.com). the online store has much duplicate content such as product detail pages and key article pages such as technical/scientific data is duplicated on both sites. What are some ways to lessen the duplicate content here? product.com ranks #1 for several key keywords so penalties can't be too bad and buyproduct.com is moving its way up the SERPS for similar terms. Ideally I'd like to combine the sites into one, but not in the budget right away. Any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | Timmmmy0 -
Should Canonical be used if your site does not have any duplicate
Should canonical be used site wide even if my site is solid no duplicate content is generated. please explain your answer
Technical SEO | | ciznerguy0 -
Strange duplicate url
From your csv report I have this strange issue. This url: elettrodomestici.yeppon.it/climatizzatori/condizionatori-fissi/prodotti/condizionatori-fissi-comfee/ it's a duplicate of this elettrodomestici.yeppon.it/climatizzatori/condizionatori-fissi/prodotti/condizionatori-fissi-comfee/ but the only url that I can see in the website is this one. Why the "-" is transalted some times in "%2D" referrer obviously is elettrodomestici.yeppon.it/climatizzatori/condizionatori-fissi/prodotti/condizionatori-fissi-comfee/solo-disponibili/ I have many duplicate url...Can you help me? Thanks
Technical SEO | | yeppon0