Is this a Panda Refresh? Are subdomains now closer to main domain?

[flanok]

A large site I own was hit by Panda last year and like many, split my site into several subdomains to eventualy recover.

Yesterday I lost considerable rankings aprox 6 to 10 places on most of my large number of terms.

However I have noticed some other changes this week.

I have been looking a lot at the pages being indexed in google, to ensure my site is clear of issues. By using the site: command.

My first observation over the last week is when doing a site command the full url (just a shortened one) is no longer shown within the results, the amount of urls this affects within my site has gradualy increased over the week.


But today when again looking at my main url site through the site: command I noticed that it is now showing the subdomain results also.

In the past when I actioned site:www.(mysite) I only got the www.(mysite) results.

But this morning when I action site:www.(mysite) I also get (subdomain).(mysite). The subdomain results without the www.

A few hours later the site:www.(mysite) results were back to normal.

So the question is this.

Is a Panda refresh now rolling out and are they treating subdomains as if the content is part of the main url?

We know they treat links as internal ones from a subdomain, but is it possible that those of us who used subdomains to tackle Panda, are going to be hit soon?

[Robert Charlton]

Is a Panda refresh now rolling out...?

Cited by rustybrick in our December Update thread... [webmasterworld.com...]

Officially labeled a Panda data refresh impacting 1.3% of English queries

[twitter.com...]

Shocked they did this before the holidays.

Google tweet [twitter.com...] timestamped 10:33 AM - 21 Dec 12 ...so flanok appears to have spotted it as it was rolling out.

[Robert Charlton]

But today when again looking at my main url site through the site: command I noticed that it is now showing the subdomain results also.

In the past when I actioned site:www.(mysite) I only got the www.(mysite) results.

But this morning when I action site:www.(mysite) I also get (subdomain).(mysite). The subdomain results without the www.

A few hours later the site:www.(mysite) results were back to normal....

...So... are they treating subdomains as if the content is part of the main url?

I'd hesitate to trust the site: operator to indicate much about how Google is ranking pages. The site: operator in particular has been notoriously undependable. That said, the interface often does reflect what's going on underneath.

Are you seeing anything to suggest that previously siloed subdomains are now affecting the rest of the site?

Conceivably, if there's much interlinking between Pandalized and non-Pandalized subdomains, that interlinking could hurt better performing subdomains, but that is only speculation.

In the long term, I myself would get rid of material that is low quality... not simply shunt it off to the side.

[Sand]

Worst part of this is, I'm in a seasonal downturn the next two weeks. So it's basically, wait until January to know if you've been hit. I suck at waiting. Wish they'd waited a couple weeks.

[Str82u]

Have you seen this video of Matt Cutts? [youtu.be...]

Without reading too much into it, it sounded to me like going with /sub/directories/ rather than sub.domains made more sense and that they were recognizing the use of subdomains to break up content in the same way as using directories.

[olaj]

We have been slaughtered by this update .. down 40%.

Seems like Google want to do these updates before the holidays now.

[Zivush]

Is a Panda refresh now rolling out and are they treating subdomains as if the content is part of the main url?

After Matt Cuts suggested hubpages to use subdomains, many content farm adopted his suggestion- they’ve splited their sites to subdomains in order to defeat the Google panda algorithm.
As far as I know, it worked partially. Now, G may have put an end to this workaround trick.

[garyr_h]

The site was hit badly three times, from the original Panda and then December 2011, and then in April/May (whenever that Panda update was, I don't feel like looking it up now). Since August, there has been positive gain from Panda for every update as I have been adding a lot more content to pages.

This update completely "slaughtered" the site, as olaj stated. All the positive gains are gone and it's actually doing the worst EVER.

Is the subdomain the only thing changed?

The site does have a subdomain, used by members to submit their own content. Is that the cause? The content is (at least, 99.9999% of it because I delete all unoriginal content when I find it or someone reports it) original. However, it isn't too wordy. Some of the posts are 100 words or less.

If this is the cause, what is the best course of action? Some of the pages get direct traffic from G while others don't. Should I simply robot.txt all the pages except the homepage and category pages (since those are not user generated)?