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Another option is to host the same content on the main site and use the canonical tag on them. But the I would do as Devanur Rafi suggests, replicate the content on the new site and 301 redirect to the old pages. All the links gained will follow the 301 so the power will transfer over. I would leave the old site up permanently otherwise any links pointing to the old domain will be lost when the 301 redirect no longer exists. Another option is to go to webmaster or some other tool get a list of those links and contact the webmaster to let them know of the site move and to change the links to the new domain.

Https was confirmed by John Mueller as a signal being used to rank sites sites higher in organic rankings however there have been issues reported lately, including one by Barry Schwartz where the sites are getting very poor results from switching over to https.

So exercise caution right now as its still early days. But https will be the future when they get the teething issues sorted out.

Your 301's if setup correctly will work fairly quickly in Google and should see results for your main pages within days sometimes hours depending on the sites popularity/crawl rate.

pagerank has not been updated since last november according to John Muller at Google and will not ever be updated again. It is still an internal metic used by Google but the latest data is no longer available to the public. So your pages will likely never have visible page rank again.

I took one look at the code and was amazed by how much is inline. Most of it should be in js and css files. I noticed the solutions pages many of them don't even have title tags! What's going on there? That needs seo attention and is a big no no for coding. This leads me to believe the code needs very close inspection. It surly cant take that long to strip a whole bunch of that code out of each page or template.

If a page is slow to load or pulls in external js files as well you can have scripts try to execute before the required code has loaded. This is probably what is happening some of the time and would explain the inconsistent nature of it.

Run the site through a bunch of validators. I am sure you will find a bunch of stuff.

I would use the hreflang tag, I implemented this on a few sites that have multiple local based versions and it works wonders and you do not have to worry about cross domain duplicate content in any way. I have a site in US dollars and one in UK pounds all the content is identical and both have been checked by John Mueller at Google and he has confirmed this is a perfect use for that scenario.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

If however they are all in the same country, then I would use the rel canonical https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en

OK I think I found out some of your issues!

There are a few major ones. I hope you don't mind but I did some detective work and found out what your site was by the code screen grabs you posted on another reply below.

OK so the first MAJOR ISSUE is that you have TWO BODY tags in your HTML! You need to check your code on all pages / templates and get it fixed ASAP. Archive.com shows that this has been a problem on your site since you did a redesign in OCT 2013. Google is looking at signals like this a lot more now and is not being favourable to them

My concern when you do a site: query in google is that your homepage does not show, it should be the first result. I see that you have 15,100 pages indexed.

When I search for your website "sitename.com.ar" I see in Google there is no title, description even the quick links are broken, just showing just one and saying untitled.

NEXT, All your pages have the same description and keyword tags! Whats going on there? I you cant make them unique then get rid of them, they are doing more damage and Google hates that stuff, I have had pages not show in SERPS because they have duplicate description tags. This happen to five of my pages recently that I somehow missed. But this is on every product Page of yours if not every page on the site.

Also I would remove the keywords meta tag, its pointless and will do you more harm than good.

The paths to your javascript and css files have two slashes (//) should only be one.

I would start with those changes and do a fetch in Google WMT and give it a few days, the homepage should reindex in a very short time frame maybe minutes.

After that we can take another look at the site. These are very basic issues that a large brand site like this should never be doing wrong, as you can see the damage it has caused. Lucky for you that you have only just started there and can be the knight in shining armour to sort it all out

First off if you want to keep the sitemap file, consider breaking it down to multiple files, one for each language/country etc...

Also FYI there are THREE methods, you can also add hreflang to the http header. This might be a good options as well to consider.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

if all pages are 100#5 not indexed then I would block it in robots.txt, Google's John Muller confirmed to me that Googlebot will continue to crawl every link to check to see if a nofollow or noindex has changed status.

So as a result we blocked our pages with robots.txt and saw a great increases in index/crawl rates on pages we want Google to pay attention to. It also reduces waste in server resources.

However if there are any pages that are index, if you block them in robots.txt then Googlebot will never be able to crawl the link to determine that it should be noindex. This means it could stay in a permanent stage of indexed.

I hope that answers all your questions?

You are making the right move for the future. You can always remove something from the disavow later and it will simply be treated as a dofollow link again once the disavow file has been re-crawled and the page re-indexed. So no big deal, that process is fast if its not a crappy deep link.

There will be a Penguin update in the next few weeks according to John Mueller at Google. So any disavow effort now will be fruitless for the next update but still worth doing for the futire as the latest data sample for it has already been taken as reported by Gary Illyes here http://www.thesempost.com/penguin-possibly-next-week-late-disavow-links-next-update/

Panda has run recently, does the the drop coincide with that date? Normally there is a shake up in the week leading up to it.

I suspect that someone may have made changes before you go there and they have not given you the full picture.

Was there any issue with the server during that time and the pages speeds were slow or not loading. WMT should give you some indication of the decline, even how dramatic the drops were and what kind of pages were dropped.

FYI you are better to remove the meta descriptions from the pages that have duplication than keep them there, but the best course of action is of course to re-write them.

If you care to share the URL we can all take a look and see if we can spot anything.

Ok so John Mueller at Google has said not to worry about sites like this, Google bot is clever enough to figure these types of sites out. To add to that this site links to all external sites with a nofollow link, so disavowing would do nothing anyway.

However there instances where it might be worthwhile adding it to a disavow list and that would be if you believe this site might changes those links to dofollow at a later stage for some reason (highly unlikely).

Also if it were a similar site but links were dofollow, it would not hurt to add it considering you have found it and deem it to be of no value.

However as John has said in the past, if you did not create it don't worry about it unless you really need to disassociate yourself from it.

Penguin will be running in less than 2 weeks according to John Mueller at Google. Will be interesting to see who get hit by that.

So many businesses are in your same situation and I don't know of any business that does not own multiple websites now. Just to be safe in case one gets hit by Penguin or Panda or another animal. With the whole if you cant beat them join them, I hear you on that. But don't do it for your main site, do it with another one and get a different phone number for it. Act as a consultant on their for your business. This way when the $%^& hits the fan your main company is not affected. As many have said before its risk tolerance.

As I said in my reply Google is aware of most of these things and simply ignores them, as in it gives them no benefit. Chances are they get their benefits from some other ranking factors.

It is also possible however that some things are working for them and getting away with them.

I have the same issues in my industry, the site ranking #1 simply should not be there, not only that but we get a lot of their unhappy customers after they have used their service only a short while.

There are many Google hangouts where I have discussed this with the Google team.

My advice don't copy them unless you want to get a penalty. Think how you can take them on with white hat, it is very very possible.

Do you want this client to have full rights to the Spanish speaking Mexican market? If so then you can use hreflang, this will mean any time anyone is searching in Spanish in Mexico Google will show Flintel instead of Teletrac.

If not then I would be very cautious of linking to each other Googlebot would see those as paid links unless they are all marked as nofollow.

hreflang can always be undone and it can happen very quickly, I have made changes and seen dramatic results in 48hrs. Just make sure you set Teletrac as x-default so that all other traffic goes to Teletrac.

I have spoken to John Mueller at Google almost once a month on this issue. He assures me that the sites in my niche are not getting benefits on the poor stuff but on other good stuff. If they remove all the listings that are bad there would be no serps left and the results would be poor for the user. Sometimes there is a limit to what Google will punish based on what is also best for the searcher. John says those tactics bad links etc.. are simply being ignored but not punished.

It drives me up the wall all the time and I hate it but there is little that can be done apart from focus on how you could do more clever outreach to gain quality social shares and links.

You can always report them for on site black hat stuff.

Is it the "Mind Body Spirit" site? I wont mention the domain incase your keeping it secret?

If so the homepage has very little content and there is no internal linking on all the huge amounts of content you have. Also I took some snippets of some articles and found that content was indexed on another site which ranked above you and is dated a year older than your content. This would be a serious issue of content duplication. This would give the overall quality of your site a Panda Issue and cause you to rank poorly.

Excuse me if I have found the wrong site, happy to help if you post the url or msg me privately.

Basically you need to be in Google News and then the article thats in the news must reach the top 10 in Search Results

Looks like this should cover all your questions

http://homebusiness.about.com/od/yourbusinesswebsite/a/google-alerts.htm

I actually learnt something myself as well on there, thanks for making me refresh my memory

I found your site through your profile,

To be honest, you don't want to confuse people and you want to make their experience a good one. Removing it or changing the name could result in less page views.

Also the navigation links are not the greatest signal for Google, concentrate on good internal linking within text, the benefit of changing your anchor text on the home button is so low.

As Justin said above, you could remove it and have your logo click through with alt text, but then you have to be sure that the people coming to your site are web savvy, many are not.

Webmaster Tools can be surprisingly accurate. Just make sure you break it down by country in the report. https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

You can edit you htacess file and do something like this

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.yourdomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301]
RewriteRule ^index.php$ / [R=301]

This will make sure that no url loads without www if it does it will 301 redirect it to www also you want to make sure that your homepage / index page is not duplicated so, have that one 301 redirect to the root as well.