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. 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.
The crawler number available when this note was published was 938 Googlebot requests before and 984 after, up 4.9 percent. A later warehouse classification repair revised that to 935 and 979 recognized requests, up 4.7 percent, or 819 and 847 when restricted to successful content requests, up 3.4 percent. The original receipt stays in the table because that was the measurement on September 3. The correction belongs beside it.
I cannot prove which signal caused the loss. 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 ... original September 3 receipt | 938 | 984 | +4.9% |
| Metric | Aug 15 to 21 | Aug 22 to 28 | Sep 2 to 8 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Family impressions | 9,278 | 1,322 | 705 |
| Family clicks | 60 | 1 | 1 |
| Weighted average position | 43.6 | 66.2 | 61.6 |
| Pages with impressions | 426 | 156 | 73 |
| Recognized crawler requests | 3,501 | 3,586 | 3,430 |
| Successful crawler content requests | 2,691 | 2,758 | 2,133 |
| Successful Googlebot content requests | 819 | 847 | 460 |
| 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 September 11 interim still shows no recovery. September 2 through 8 produced 705 impressions, 1 click, and 73 pages with impressions, down 92.4 percent from the baseline impression count. Recognized crawler requests remained almost flat, while successful content requests and successful Googlebot content requests fell. The formal checkpoints remain 30, 60, and 90 days after August 22. Recovery would make a better story. The current story is that different discovery signals can separate sharply, and even the crawler side needs more than one number.
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.