Re:SEO penalties of moving our blog to a subdomain
by ericclemmons on Friday January 16, 2015 @12:26AM
(#8897386)
You're absolutely right!
In my experience, we've had more bad than good with URL changes.
The interesting part is that often a "URL cleanup" would result in a quick "boost" in traffic/rankings, but would continually slump, often even unrecoverable after reverting.
There's probably a publication bias here. When people change things and traffic goes up, they don't run to tell the world about it.
Though anecdotally, I have a lot of reference-type content that has been bubbling up over the years seemingly solely because it hasn't changed at all in 7 years. The big players like to refresh their design and layout every few years.