Homepage not showing up, and other redirected sites taking a big hit

[beavboyz]

I have a novelty online business where I print pictures on toilet paper. When I first started it about 4 years ago I did some link building, typical SEO and got it on the first page of google for

printed toilet paper
custom toilet paper
custom printed toilet paper

No SEO work has been done since, and it has naturally maintained a #1 or #2 listing for all those searches. (lots of natural links from other blogs and forums)

Since making that site I have done a few made for adsense type sites and hosted them as sub domains examples are

goldendoodles.jeremyinc.com
morkie.jeremyinc.com
minigoldendoodles.jeremyinc.com

(my family breeds dogs, and I made some pocket change from these sites)

Thinking I would get better rankings for those three sites I regigestered TLD's for each one, and did a 301 redirect (which I have done in the past with no glitches)

Now those three sites are receiving about half the search engine traffic (it's been about a month) and I don't know what's going on.

Then I searched for
printed toilet paper
custom toilet paper
custom printed toilet paper

and MY HOMEPAGE IS NOT EVEN ON GOOGLE I'm not sure if those other sites have anything to do with jeremyinc.com being removed, but I just thought it seemed relevant

Any body have an idea of what's going on?

tl;dr - TLD jeremyinc.com all clean, old domain. Subdomains are a bit spammy and were redirected to new TLD's. Now the new TLD's are taking a hit and traffic and jeremyinc.com is not even listed on SERP's

[tedster]

Welcome to the forums, beavboyz. Whenever you redirect from an old domain to a new one, ranking troubles are a common risk and one month is a short time.

There are a lot of discussions here that report traffic drops for a couple months after changing the domain and just a few who had little trouble. I'd say the main thing you can do now is double check everything technical about the change. Here's one of many earlier discussions [webmasterworld.com] about the topic.

The good thing is that traffic recovery tends to be faster now than it was a year ago.

[beavboyz]

Cool, thanks a lot tedster. I did it once before without an ounce of trouble. It could be because I switched from a blogspot (google) blog being hosted at example.com/blog to example2.com blog still hosted by google, so they knew about every minor detail.

I will double check the niche sites and see what's going on

Any clue about jeremyinc.com ? that one still confuses me, I have a lot of high PR links to the homepage from being featured in newspapers and magazines, and I have not touched the domain for quite a long time. I don't know why the homepage would not show up, but I am still getting strong listings for all the pages and directories.

a search for jeremyinc used to produce one of those nifty link units, like if you search for microsoft. I also had a lot of two part listings

Now the homepage is a goner, no clue why, google webmasters does not show anything either...

[Planet13]

Huh...

I get you at number 5 in the natural listings, but not for your home page, for the page:

[jeremyinc.com...]

When I search for your P T P keyword (the first one you listed - I abbreviated because you don't want this forum page to rank above yours in the search engines).

Sheer conjecture: Maybe because you are redirecting people away from your sub domains, it is somehow decreasing the overall authority of your domain, thus weakening your ranking for your home page?

[beavboyz]

The way I understand it subdomains do not pass / add value to the TLD, however directories do. I have not changed anything on the TLD, or any of the directories, just the subdomains. I am perplexed

[beavboyz]

Oh wow, that is my embarassing old design. I am going to have to redirect that one to the proper page.

[beavboyz]

ummm... I think it just fixed itself...google bug?

What are the chances the one time I search in a few months it happens when google has a bug...

Or is it just me?

[Planet13]

The way I understand it subdomains do not pass / add value to the TLD, however directories do.

I have heard both theories about this - that they do help add domain authority and that they don't - so I threw that out there in the hope that someone else might share their opinion.

[beavboyz]

I have done quite a bit of reading, and I think the general consensus is that they don't. Unless of course you link up to the TLD, then they would pass value just like any other site would.

A lot of REALLY spammy sites are made under subdomains, but the TLD always seems to be strong (think webs, blogspot, wordpress)

[tedster]

The way I understand it subdomains do not pass / add value to the TLD, however directories do.

It mostly depends on how they are interlinked. Some domains offer subdomains or subdirectories to different users and they are almost independent. As an extreme case, think of wordpress.com or typepad.com. So there just isn't any rule you can depend on.

[beavboyz]

Gotcha, I treated the subdomains as separate entities, they had nothing to do with jeremyinc.com

I see now that the homepage is back in the listings, and my neat link unit is back as well! Must have been a glitch that I just happened upon. Glad that is settled

I will play the waiting game with the sub domains. Thanks for all your responses!