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My vote is redirect them to the new sku data; you will probably drop in the rankings for a while, but I would imagine in a few months you will come back.
The biggest reason to redirect is just business related - ultimately you want your customers to have a good experience and part of that is making sure they are getting what they need. Once they get to your site, you have to wow them and do a good job fulfilling the order. Just getting them to the site is just the start of the whole process.
Do you have Yoast set to index the categories and tags?
There is an option in to noindex those items in the options. Could be the problem.
Yep, in terms of Google picking it up in the SERPs, they are only going to display 1 author (if appropriate).
So, it depends on whether or not that is your intended goal.
Drop them like they are hot.
Ask them to evaluate your link profile and ask for suggested improvements.
Also, while they are doing that, you should take a look at their own link profile and see if they know what they are talking about.
You can remove them via GWT as Chris has so aptly mentioned. Best way to do IMO.
My opinion, target both of them using two separate campaigns.
The market is telling you what they want.
Get a UPS box for one of the businesses with a VOIP # for one of them, or even a Google Voice # (although be careful there because if you get huge, you may not always be able to keep that #). Unless you get tons of snail mail...
Then you can legitimately list 2 separate companies in the local listings.
Why not just keep their site up and rebrand everything with your company. You do own it, so don't just burn the site. You may be able to craft different content/topics which would be better suited for each site and thus capture a larger portion of your target audience.
It takes so much time to build up a site, it would be a shame to just switch it.
I would advise against using the sites for links to or from one another, that will hurt you in the long run.
This has proven very helpful to us: http://backlinko.com/the-definitive-guide-to-keyword-research
Sometimes they do not choose to utilize the meta description and titles I believe because they may think something is more relevant to return based on the specific user query.
As far as I know, you cannot do anything about what gets displayed by the engine. So long as you have checked that each page has it's own unique meta, then there is not much else that you can do.
Your meta may appear as intended for some searches and not for others is what I am really saying. It is the engine's prerogative as to what is displayed based on the user's query and I am seeing more and more that the engine's are ignoring your page/post specific meta tags when it comes to the display.
Sometimes they do not choose to utilize the meta description and titles I believe because they may think something is more relevant to return based on the specific user query.
As far as I know, you cannot do anything about what gets displayed by the engine.
Your changes may appear as intended for some searches and not for others is what I am really saying. It is the engine's prerogative as to what is displayed based on the user's query.
You are correct, the majority of users do not know what a TLD is or probably even care.
I suppose that it depends on what kind of customers that you have, but my experience with my customer base is that they would probably not click on something that looked out of the norm to them because they might think it is a scam or something that they have heard about on the news.
Also, I am thinking of it in terms of your customer remembering your site address into the future. Let's say they click on your site because you rank high, look at the info and then bounce. How many of them are going to remember the TLD if they want to come back to the site via direct entry into the navi bar? There will be a certain % (I think it would be high) who would type in yourdomain.com instead of yourdomain.company
I have seen this many times with close matches to domain names - people come to the site, look at it, then bounce. They come back 2 weeks later via a direct entry into the navi bar, except they enter a slight variation of the actual domain name because (I suspect) they remember that they visited a site they liked, but cannot totally remember the exact address so they do their best. That is why generally if possible, we grab close variant domain names and forward them to the main domain with GA parameters for tracking. It always amazes me at how much traffic we get monthly from people entering in the close, but not exact, domain name in the navi bar.
www is considered a subdomain of the main domain.
Generally speaking, Google will give the main domain credit for what is on the subdomain. I don't think this is always the case though if you have really specific content on a subdomain and it is targeted for a certain topic because people would start linking to the subdomain as opposed to the main domain. So I think the correct answer is that it depends on your site and situation. If you can, everything should go on 1 domain unless it makes sense for some other reason to split things on multiple domains/subdomains.
If you have a ton of advertising out there for www...., why change it? Most people don't know that www is a subdomain (or care). You are not going to pick up a significant advantage SEO wise by switching to the main domain vs using the www version, so just don't mess with it.
Unless for some reason you have a good reason to create a bunch of subdomains, like if you had a real estate site nationwide and you wanted them to be organized by city like houston.mysite.com, atlanta.mysite.com, etc.
I think you have to also think about how many people know about a .company TLD.
Most people outside of the IT world only know or are comfortable with a .com, .net and .org
Personally I would wait to see the market's acceptance of a certain domain before going too far down the road into it.
It doesn't totally answer it I don't think, but it may shed light onto the issue. It could be a server specific/site specific kind of need as to why they are doing this.
So what you're really saying is that your click percentage is double what it was before...
I would only take the impression count with a grain of salt. Also, take a look at all your analytics sources and look at ratios rather than just the raw #s; you will be able to get some more actionable data from ratio analysis. Also, personally, and again this is a preference and some may like it or hate it, but I like statcounter.com for some analytics. I have also used Kissmetrics which depending on what your business model is, can also be good (also shout out to CrazyEgg). Worry much more about how many unique visitors are going to the site and your conversion rate (for whatever product it is).
If you focus on efficiency, you won't have to put as much input (unique visitors) in the top of the funnel. Of course, this is easy for me to say because I have no practical advice on how to make your machine more efficient, but just that it is a good thing to focus on.
Did your traffic also drop at the same time, by a similar percentage?