Do subdomains penalties affect main domain?

The question is simple, as the title states. However, I personally know that subdomains act like an individual site, I'm not new at this. The problem is. the main domain dropped from the Google's SERPs for about 1 weeks now ( no ranking at all on any keyword ) and after 1 week, i am starting to think that I was penlized for something. My site has 2 years, constant good backlinks, contect refreshed daily etc. I have also made a forum on a subdomain, that is related to the main site normally. Now I'm thinking that the subdomain was penalized because of that, the main domain also. Those domains are interlinked very good, so it might be a case of bad neighbouring linking. I'm not sure, but due to the fact I do not sell nor buy links, I don't do any black hat seo, I don't see the reason of any penalty, so I'm taking this into consideration. What do you think?

 

Hi, if your sub domain has been penalised for something and your main domain is linking to it, then you would be linking to a bad neighbour.

 

Try finding out why they gave you penalty. or let me know the url .. might help u in finding it !!

 

Exactly, you are right.

 

The site is www.filecluster.com and the subdomain is it's forum...we have tried to figure out what's the penalty, but couldn't put our fingers on anything, maybe you guys can see something we don't

edit: we also disabled links in signatures on the forum, just in case that was the problem

 

so..any ideeas?

 

No they do not, because search engines no longer treat subdomains as separate sites. What you're probably seeing is the effect of a "new content boost" wearing off; this is perfectly normal.

 

Did you use your forum to spam your main site with a lot of keyword rich links hoping you'd rank better?

 

Jaysonnhs, that wouldn't work nowadays anyway because search engines no longer treat subdomains as independent sites.

 

Ah - I was under the impression that its frowned upon to create a spammy blog with tons of links back to your main site. Even read a few articles about people reporting people to Google for doing it.

 

No, I have only 3-4 links from the forum to the main site, link that point to categories. Also, about what Dan said, my main domain ranked pretty well within Google ( 5-6k visits/day ) and now barely reaches 5-600 visits for the past 2 weeks. I don't know if it's normal behavior, but 2 weeks in my opinion means some kind of penalty. Either way, we simply don't know what to do, we also filled a reconsideration request...but i don't know if it will do any good

 

can you give us a couple keywords that you used to rank for? Is Google traffic the only traffic you're missing?

 

vexx, how old is your Web site?

 

2 years Dan

 

Ok. The first thing I'd do then is check the backlinks coming into your Web site. Some of those sites that linked to yours may no longer exist. If you don't have a Google Webmasters account, I'd create one.

While you're at it, you should also check to see how many people are searching for the keywords your pages are optimized for, and cross-check that against the sites that are linking back to yours as well.

(In other words, I highly doubt this is a penalty - I think there's an external factor at work here.)

 

We ofc have a Webmasters account.

Lemme tell you the short story of this "drop", maybe for you has some sense, for us it doesn't.

First, this drop in SERPs happened 3 weeks ago, all the backlinks dissapeared from Webmasters. After 2 days tho, at least half of the backlinks were again in place and the SERPs came back to normal. 3-4 days after that, the rankins dropped again, no backlinks in webmasters and it has been like that since this day. In our webmaster's account, some backlins came back, we checked the backlinks we had, they're still there but Webmasters didn't picked them. So, as a conclusion, Webmasters didn't picked all our links ( and in my opinion, it didn't picked at least half back ) but most of the links are up. Besides that, we gained in the past 2 weeks ( after this penalty ), 10-30 backlinks, again, not picked by Webmasters. Also, we have pages in the SERPs, that ranked in the first page due lack of competition or no competition. Now, they rank within the last page but competition is the same or none.

edit: we currently have 20-30k backlinks, so backlinking is not a big issue in the rankings ( relevant links )

 

Ok, now I get it. Other site owners have been complaining about this as of late, and even Google is asking people to submit feedback as well. I'm sure you've heard of the old "Google Dance" - this has ALL the markings of a Google algorithm change; though I have a sneaky suspicion they're in the process of upgrading their hardware and integrating their recent acquisitions into their system (specifically DoubleClick). Not only that but other Google properties have been acting really weird lately (on the server level), specifically Feedburner.

Frankly, I wouldn't worry too much about this right now. If it continues to be a problem, then I'd look into doing things differently.

 

We also thought about a Google Dance, but it kinda lasted a while so that's why i'm thinking about a penalty. Usually, a "default" Google dance takes between 5 days - 2 weeks, as i've noticed but this time is rather wierd. I also don't wanna do changes all around, also knowing that we didn't break any webmaster rules. Well, I think in the end time will tell and hope for the best.

Tnx alot Dan for your feedback on this, I really appreciate it

 

Well, as I said, it has the hallmarks of a Dance, but I don't think it is one. Probably just some technical issues on their end they're trying to sort out (hene the mention of DoubleClick and Feedburner).

 

Thats exactly what I've been experiencing... I got 0-10 visitors from google to one website. At days it seems traffic is picking up. The graph shows something like DAY1=30 visitors, DAY2=70 visitors, but then DAY3 traffic drops to zero again... This repeated 3 times now, and almost the whole march I've been without google traffic which is 70% for this website. No blackhat, no spam, only original content and building backlinks.