Field Note
Google Cut the AS400System Family 86 Percent. We're Not Rolling It Back.
Every established AS400System.com property fell together the day after Google's August spam update finished, while indexing and crawler traffic stayed alive.
The setup.
AS400System.com is the hardware center of a growing IBM Power campaign. Its branch reached twelve hosts and 781 sitemap URLs in about six weeks, with separate properties for AI, FlashSystem, pricing, and Power 5 through Power 12. Google had been discovering them quickly. Then the dashboard fell off a cliff.
The finding.
The cliff has a date. Google's global August 2026 spam update finished August 21. On August 22, the root and every established subdomain fell together. Family impressions dropped from 9,278 in the seven days before the break to 1,322 in the seven days after it. Clicks went from 60 to 1. Individual subdomains lost between 83.2 and 97.9 percent.
The sites did not disappear. Search Console showed 683 indexed pages after the drop, no manual action, and no security issue. Googlebot requests increased 4.9 percent across the same comparison. The server recorded no Googlebot 5xx responses. Meanwhile, AS400Software.com and AS400IBMSystems.com both grew. This was a ranking decision about one domain family, not the AS400 subject running out of demand.
I cannot prove which signal caused it. The rapid subdomain expansion and new network-wide relationships landed at almost the same time as the spam update, so the clean causal story does not exist. What does exist is a clean baseline and a network that still has real reasons to exist.
| Metric | Aug 15 to 21 | Aug 22 to 28 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Family impressions | 9,278 | 1,322 | -85.8% |
| Family clicks | 60 | 1 | -98.3% |
| Root impressions | 5,300 | 1,057 | -80.1% |
| Root average position | 50.5 | 66.4 | 15.9 positions worse |
| Root pages with impressions | 117 | 48 | -59.0% |
| Googlebot requests | 938 | 984 | +4.9% |
| Property | Impression change |
|---|---|
| AS400Software.com | +5.2% |
| AS400IBMSystems.com | +4.8% |
| AS400IBMSystem.com | +282.0% |
The change.
Nothing was rolled back. No subdomains were removed. No content was purged. No network relationship was hidden to make the campaign look smaller. Planned subdomains can continue when they have a distinct job. Google is one discovery system inside a larger portfolio strategy, not the authority that decides whether the portfolio gets built.
The first checkpoints are 30, 60, and 90 days after August 22. The warehouse will track Google impressions, average position, pages receiving impressions, indexed pages, Googlebot requests, AI-crawler requests, human page requests, and confirmed AI citations. Recovery would make a better story. Continued machine and human growth without Google recovery would still tell us something useful.
More real work, shown
Every field note is one finding from a live website, the data behind it, and the metric we are watching next.