Subdomain Redirect: when does traffic return?

[seodudez]

We recently moved some of our pages over to a subdomain. While the pages that have been moved over are fine I have noticed traffic to our other pages on the original domain(www) are receiving less traffic.

Has anyone ever noticed this? I know that traffic loss occurs when you switch an entire domain so I am wondering if something similar is happening.

Thoughts?

[tedster]

You are speaking about Google search traffic, I assume. Is the traffic loss larger than you would expect, given that you moved a number of pages to a subdomain? And were those moved pages a kind of unified and focused area? Or is there topical overlap with the main website?

[seodudez]

Thanks Tedster.

Yes, it is larger than expected. I have some pages that were left on the main domain and now they are receiving less traffic. The ones that were moved to the new subdomain are doing great, but the ones left on the old(www) domain are receiving less traffic.

There is topical overlap with the main site. It wasn't unified. I wonder if the links I was receiving to the main domain(www) have already been moved to the new subdomain thereby decreasing the value of the main domain. It happened pretty fast though. I just made the change like 10 days ago.

[tedster]

Have you studied which keywords are now sending less traffic to the main website?

[The_Fox]

This is easy if you have the analytics data. Compare your old traffic to new traffic for the www pages. It might be that your old traffic was majorly directed towards the page that you moved, so now they go to the subdomain, provided everything is redirected properly, and hence, the www pages still get the same amount of traffic but it "seems" that they're getting less traffic.

Compare what KWs gave you most traffic earlier. See if they're showing up for the subdomain pages now.

Compare what KWs are getting you traffic for the www pages now and check if those KWs were present in the traffic data earlier.

[seodudez]

Well, I believe the problem is that our sitemaps are still directing to the old www domain pages. Of course these get redirected but maybe google is seeing these as bad/errors...

[tedster]

You might be onto something there. Sitemaps should only list URLs that resolve 200 OK.

Did you change your internal linking - or are you also leaning on the 301 redirects in that case as well?

[seodudez]

Thanks Tedster. For internal linking we are leaning on the 301s too. You think that might be it?

[tedster]

Both are, shall we say, not optimal - they should be fixed in any case.