Deleting a subdomain and avoid ranking damage

[FrankWeb]

A few weeks back I decided to delete this subdomain a have had for the last two years. I used a redirect to another subdomain on the same url.
Now I see a sudden drop in traffic and ranking on Google as well.
Could that have something to do with it, and did I use the right method or should I change something?
Thanks for your help!

[tedster]

To answer your question in a helpful way, we need more fine-pointed detail.

1. Which traffic/rankings fell off for you? Was it traffic/rankings that normally came to the old subdomain?

2. What happened to the content that was on the old subdomain?

3. Did you use a 301 permanent redirect, or some other approach?

4. Did you make other sigificant changes (technical, content, internal or external linking) at the same time?

[FrankWeb]

1. The traffic and rankings fell for the main url.

2. I deleted all of the content on the old sub-domain. I should mention that on the subdomain I had a lot of links to my main url.

3. In cpanel I put a forward to the main url so I believe it is a 301, also looking at the
.htaccess doc:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^subdomain.widget.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.subdomain.widget.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http: //www.widget.com/subdomain [R=301,L]

4. I did not make any other changes. The remaining parts of the website stayed the same and did not change.

thanks for the help!

[FrankWeb]

Hi is anybody able to help me out on this issue.

I have done a bit of searching and now wonder if I should be using a 301 or a different method.

To summarize;
- All of the content is and will be deleted from the subdomain, and will not be placed on another part or subdomain.

- This sub-domain still receives traffic, and to not let that traffic go to waste, I would like to forward this traffic to my other subdomain on the same url (similar topic).

- The sub-domain has incomming links from the web, and PR4 from Google. How can I let this PR value or 'blood sweat and tears work' not go to waste?

Thanks already to those who would like to help me out!

[tedster]

Sounds like you cut off some of the PR circulation. The transfer of backlink influence through a 301 redirect can take lots of time, and I'm not convinced that it always happens these days -- not unless the content has actually moved.

I used a redirect to another subdomain on the same url.

Your code shows a 301 redirect to directory, and not to a subdomain. If that directory then redirects to a subdomain, you have a chain of 301s. Backlink influence will not pass through a chain of redirects

[g1smd]

A simplification of the code:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?subdomain\.widget\.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.widget.com/subdomain/ [R=301,L]

However, your code rewrites all pages on the old-subdomain all going to the same single index page in the new folder. I never feel that is a good idea. In that case I would have used a custom 404 error page for all files in the old sub-domain, and maybe (and that is just a "maybe") a redirect on just the single index page. The trailing "/" on the rewritten URL is important too. Omitting that "/" can cause problems, as I have mentioned before.