Problem with sub folder rankings

[Jord]

Got a tricky one! A scenario I haven't come across before.

Client has domain: example.com which ranks well for 19K keywords. They have a different arm/section to the business that they decide to build a new website different look etc in a subfolder eg - example.com/new-website.

The new section has been live for a year now, had some really good link work but gets very little love from google, when I check the server logs and see how often google bot visits the subfolder it is minimal when compared to the rest of the site.

All the usual checks like linking from root to sub folder other internal linking, dup content etc has been checked.

Anyone come across this situation before? Could an issue be the complete different HTML markup on the same domain? Site has over 2K pages is crawl budget a worry at this level?

 

[Ryuzaki]

@Jord, Yeah, so what happens is, when sections of a site (sub-folders) have a completely different HTML architecture, Google can detect this and treat it as a separate entity (for lack of better labels).

Why they do this, I don't know. But there was a point in time I would go overkill on sites, creating different designs for different parts of the site, simply because I thought it was cool and users would enjoy that. I never saw any negative effects myself, maybe because enough of it was similar and it called all the same CSS and JS files, but when I would see mentions about this my ears would perk up.

I'm not talking about hearsay in the industry, but coming straight from the current horse's mouth, John Mueller.

It's kind of the same way they can penalize one section of a site with Panda. It definitely happens. So in your case if it's a different CMS install with a different theme even, I would absolutely expect that this is the issue.

I'm not saying switching it to the main theme is the right answer, though that would probably be pretty easy. Who knows how long it would take for them to reverse the decision or "merge" the sites, you know. I'm just telling you what I've read. Hopefully someone else that's dealt with these problems can speak up.