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Just to voice in - I agree with what's being said.  You can't target them all and the title would read horribly.  Even if you got rankings, your clickthroughs wouldn't be what they should be.

I like the one Todd came up with.

Question one might be - why is Google deciding that's the most important information on the page?  If you have a well-worded description tag and quality content, what is missing from what you're doing that this donations area is what they're grabbing onto?

Generally I've found that if the wrong information is being displayed as a description int he SERPs, it's generally a shortcoming in the description tag or content.

Assuming that's all working, heck you could use something as simple as an iframe to "hide" the content.  Technically Google can crawl iframe data but I'd bet dollars to doughnuts (whatever that means) that if you did this it certainly wouldn't show up in your description tag.  The perk to this being, it is kinda-crawlable so it's not "hidden".

Mike - you took the words right out of my mouth and I'm glad I read the replies before answering.

The question shouldn't be, "should I remove the PDFs?" it should be, "What about my PDFs are ranking higher and how do I move that to my product pages?"

Well - he's done more than a few so it's easy for one to go MIA.  Like a Cutts video.

In 2011 Google extended the canonical tag to support cross-domain.  Rand made a video of it ...

watch?v=O8drPXudZZc

I'm sure there's folks on both sides but giving my opinion, provided that the redirects are (as you say) directing visitors tot he right page then I'd just do them all at once.  Right now they're being picked up as dead links, you're just fixing that not gaming the system.

One could ask WWGD?  Redirecting serves the visitor better so Google would say it's best to redirect them than leave them floundering on a 404 page.  In this case I have to agree.

Penguin 2.1 has taken place since then (on October 6th).  If you're still in Google's dog house then it's a matter of not doing enough or not doing it they way they wanted you to.  Or that wasn't the issue.

I have seen a number of cases where people believe they have been penalized when in fact their links have only been devalued.  This leads to a scenario where they spend gobs of time getting links removed and submitting disavow lists without effect when the real issue was that the links they had held less value and what they should have been doing was building high quality links instead.

I suppose that technically if you really wanted to come clean you could ask the currently linking domains to remove their links since the subject of the site has changed.  Those that don't, you could disavow.

I'm not saying to do that or not, and I don't know if I know anyone who would but it's an option.

If I had to place my money of what would happen next from what I've seen int he past I would put it on one of two things assuming you are 301 redirecting to the new homepage:

1 - Nothing.  Penalty passes instantly or is already assigned to the domain which was part of what the focus of Penguin 2.1 was about.  Matt Cutts, discussing this update said:

"The previous iteration of Penguin would essentially only look at the home page of a site. The newer generation of Penguin goes much deeper and has a really big impact in certain small areas."

or ...

2 - Google gets tricked and passes the weight but not the penalty.  In this event the rankings will likely last somewhere between 1 and 3 weeks before the penalty follows.  I've seen this happen as well but mainly in cases where the penalty was an "unnatural links" warning.

Google luck and if you go for it, I'd love to hear how it turns out.

The link to the example site isn't going anywhere.  Can you repost?

Sorry if i caused any confusion in my reply.

The fact is that for some time now Google has treated sub-domains in roughly the same light as folders in the site (so blog.domain.com is akin to domain.com/blog/ to use the simplest example.

The problem isn't that your using a folder, unique domain or sub-domain, it's that the only thing pointing to it is weak (sorry - just calling a spade a spade to save us time).  You need to get stronger strength to the page you're talking about and to do that you can either strengthen it or strengthen the TLD.  Preferably both.  When you can prove you "deserve" to be found ... you will.

Hope that helps.

Dave

I'm going to guess your client got impacted b the Penguin 2.1 update.  It may well not be a case of your client getting penalized however as opposed to the other sites getting rewarded.  I've been up against Findlaw, etc ... they have good links.

I have to guess that if we're honest - they have better links that your client and your clients links got devalued in the update.  So it's more a case of the client losing weight than directories being increased in value.

If I have to put my bet on the table it's that there's no current reason for Google to believe that the page should rank.  The URL is a sub of a weak domain.  It knows it's there but has no reason to believe (at this time) that it should be trusted or warrant user attention.

Get some quality links to it and it will appear.  Time will also do but without links it won't rank for anything but your name so ...

Eric Ward did a good Hangout last Friday and gave them the nod too.  the full 1hr 48min is at but but the short answer matches the answers above.  If it makes sense for your user, it makes sense for Google.  I think I hear Matt say that once or twice too.

watch?v=a8oDC0Q-IV0

How much unique content is there on each event page?