Yep, and I recently moved a message board that has been part of the main domain for years and gave it it’s own domain.
Reason being that I have a mammoth site and the bots kept getting confused and throwing a lot of errors for the message board. I finally decided to move it but keep it linked from the menu.
The crazy ups and downs and incompatible stats started soon after that. I also filed for reinclusion for the message board btw, and surprisingly it worked and it is getting indexed quickly and at it’s old spots. I was prepared to have issues with throwing up a massive board on a new domain, but it went very well and quickly.
Filing for reinclusion was not really appropriate for the situation, but it seems to have been successful anyways.
Anyway, the removal of the message board may have well caused google to reclassify the site and so I am seeing traffic shaping – makes sense.
I’ll just sit and watch and see what happens.