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Recreating it just to 301 it again probably won’t fix this.
If that subdomain was fully indexed and had 300 sitewide links per page, you basically removed a massive internal link network overnight. Even if it was “duplicate,” Google may have been treating it like a separate entity passing equity.
A 301 consolidates signals, but it’s not instant and not always 1:1, especially at that scale. Two months isn’t crazy long in that context.
Before rebuilding anything, I’d check:
Are all old URLs properly 301ing and not 404ing?
Did crawl frequency drop in GSC after removal?
Were any of those links actually driving traffic or external links?Recreating and redirecting again could look messy and unstable. I’d focus on rebuilding strong internal linking directly on the main domain instead of relying on a duplicate structure.
Out of curiosity, was the subdomain truly duplicate content, or slightly different templates/URLs? That detail matters a lot.
