Comment by sitebolts
6 hours ago
Google's always adjusting its search rankings, but it's rare for a legitimate site to suffer such a sudden massive hit without reason.
My first thought would be that they accidentally blocked Google's crawler (maybe through some kind of anti-AI setting?) or that Google believes that the site is serving malware or spam. Either scenario can have that kind of effect. I can see that their forum at least appears to have strong Cloudflare anti-bot rules in place, so that might be the case.
They're also using a subdomain for both their wiki and forum, which Google has been observed to punish. They might consider moving each of those to their own separate .com domain.
But aside from that usual stuff, there's one more possible reason that's specific to this site. In November of last year, the Pokemon Company rebranded their "Pokemon Trainer Club" to "Pokemon Trainer Central", which is the first result that comes up when you search for "Pokemon Central".
That change was made a few months before the sudden drop in traffic, but could still be a viable explanation here. Google does routine re-ranking on a daily basis along with occasional major re-ranking, which happens maybe a few times a year, so the delayed hit that they saw could have come from Google finally recognizing that most people who search for "Pokemon Central" are no longer looking for the wiki like was once true in the past.
https://gonintendo.com/contents/54863-pokemon-trainer-club-r...
A blocked Googlebot would’ve caused a report of 403s in the Search Console, which isn’t the case. And the subdomain has worked perfectly fine for the last 15 years.
You may have a point with the Trainer Central rebranding, but please consider this in the context of Italian language results. It’s not about reaching the home of the wiki (which is pretty much the only page that’s still indexed), it’s all the other search queries (Pokémon names, moves, games, etc - without adding “pokemon central” even) that usually returned our wiki’s dedicated page as first result (or top 5 at least) and now those specific pages are not even indexed anymore.
> They're also using a subdomain for both their wiki and forum, which Google has been observed to punish. They might consider moving each of those to their own separate .com domain.
Any sources for this? AFAIK, Google treats websites on a subdomain as a separate entity.
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/seo-s...
> Things we believe you shouldn't focus on: As SEO has evolved, so have the ideas and practices (and at times, misconceptions) related to it. What was considered best practice or top priority in the past may no longer be relevant or effective due to the way search engines (and the internet) have developed over time.
> Subdomains versus subdirectories: From a business point of view, do whatever makes sense for your business. For example, it might be easier to manage the site if it's segmented by subdirectories, but other times it might make sense to partition topics into subdomains, depending on your site's topic or industry.
Doesn't quite explicitly say it treats them the same, but it kinda implies it.
Google have also blatantly lied in the past about SEO. My familiarity with the subject is about a decade old, but I don't expect Google to have improved in that regard, quite the contrary. I don't think you can take anything in their guidelines as 'truth that will help for SEO'.