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I'm back about a month later to report that it finally appears to have worked. Google is now pulling up my metatitle for a variety of queries. Now I want to get Google to show local landing pages in the SERPS instead of the home page so that the location shows in the title and appears to be more relevant. Always a challenge.  I know the standard tactics, but specific ideas are welcome. Building a silo of local pages around estate planning is hard as the topic is not really local.

Thanks everyone. Since 301 redirects are out of the question, what I've done is found all the directories that really shouldn't be on this site at all and noindexed them. None of those pages are good for rank for anything so it doesn't matter. The client is instructing their 'customers' to get their sites off the doubleknot site and onto their own domains. Once those are moved over there will still be lots of links pointing to doubleknot and fixing them will be a nightmare because there are just too many, but I'm going to see if they can do a sitewide edit and add rel="nofollow" to each link pointing to doubleknot's irrelevent directories and also see if we can do a mass search and replace to point the links to the right domain when necessary. If there is not a pattern, that will no be possible and someone will have to do it by hand. With noindex and nofollow working for us, that might be enough My client is a team of IT and computer science experts, and they've been advised of the problem. They're looking into ways to put their degrees to work to clean the data. @Richard, to answer your question, their rank is terrible. That's why they called me. Their website is also not at all optimized so I'm restructuring the architecture and asking them to provide new copy. Then I'll do the standard on-site optimization. It could be that might be enough to turn things around. And then it's linkbuilding time. Time will tell. Thanks again!

It happens all too often when site owners take a path they or someone advising them thinks makes sense at the time. Until it goes bad. Then it just becomes a beast...

Hey Kathy, Indeed this is a common problem amongst webmasters. In addition to Bob's suggestion to add a Title Tag, I'd also suggest powering up your co's Google+ page. A quick check of your G+ page shows: a) There are no posts with links to your website - this is a missed opportunity, both from an indexation and potential customer funnel perspective. b) Your "about" shows your YouTube only, so I'd add a ton more in your co's description, including links to your 7 x main categories (What's Special About Our Vanilla, Beans, Extract, Paste, Powders, Sugars & Books) and why people should buy from you / the value your brand brings (value proposition) I'd also find ways of getting more followers on your G+ biz account from those currently following Patrician Rain's personal G+ page, as she already has 64 followers (and been viewed 11,665 times). While you're at it, I'd verify your G+ biz page too. Google My Business provide a help page that should help. Re your Twitter and FB pages, they seem to be in good order Another suggestion: I'd add a link to your "Bulk Vanilla Beans" page within your blog post page text, as currently it has none at all, yet the text itself does a great job of answering many well-thought-out questions and also because your Bulk Vanilla Beans page has a link to your blog posts in the 2nd paragraph. Last suggestion: on your YouTube page, add links to both your Twitter and Facebook, therefore creating a matrix of links to help users both find and engage with your brand on social media. Hope all this helps, in addition to Bob's excellent resources and suggestions

When I run that page in Open Site Explorer, I do not see a redirect. (I also don't see any links.) If I switch it to look at the root domain instead, I see a bunch of links to various pages. It seems that this root domain hosts pages for other companies, including lawyers, web design companies, and this seo company. So if you look at the links to the root domain, you will see links to the various companies on that domain.

Thanks everyone. All great advice and exactly what I'm doing and have planned. So the advice I hear here is, be patient, and tell them they need to be too! I'm curious what you all think about this page: http://www.beverlys.com/fabric.html The word fabric is there 71 times. I know "density" isn't supposed to matter, but over optimization does. Could that be construed as such even though there is a valid reason for those to be there? Their top 3 competitors' fabric pages are different:  http://www.joann.com/fabric/ 48 times https://www.fabric.com/ 29 times http://www.hancockfabrics.com/ 30 times

Sorry for the slow response Christy. We never could pinpoint the problem. Since everything looked good, I asked her to give it time. Took about 6 months after the website launch, but she's back on the first page in position 2 and 3 for "LDS poems." She just kept doing everything right - writing poems and posting  in her channels. She also continues to post on Blogspot on the same day she posts on her main site. I advised her not too but it apparently doesn't matter. Google is not showing her blogpspot site in the SERPs. I added the publisher and author tags on this site and connected that to her G+ account, so maybe that helped at the time.

It looks like the sites are just taking the content from their site, and putting it onto other blogs to generate backlinks. It's hard to imagine links from all that duplicate content helping much, but apparently it's working well enough for them. What keywords are they ranking for? To answer your question, though, you absolutely should not give up on these niches. These sites barely have any PR. You should be able to easily outrank them with a decent site and a few authoritative links.

I agree with deleting the WordPress.com account and if you or the client are worried about losing people just put up a "Sorry, we've moved" post up stating and directing people where to go. Then delete it!

Thanks guys. I should probably clarify. I do know what to do on the site itself. And I have several ideas on what to do to build inbound links( in which social will play a large part) as I realize that is their only hope of ranking. I plan to target universities that have social good programs to try and get on their radar as one example. I'll also be looking for guest blogging opportunities on related sites. And we'll also be doing Facebook campaigns. The whole site is social and is built around the concept of social good sharing. So as we get users, the buzz will happen because the system invites it. But I'm looking for ways to get Google to notice even without that happening yet. Clearly, given that there is no content to speak of, inbound links and social shares, tweets and the likes are critical. But, given the competition and the lack of content, this is a very difficult task. Love to hear any creative ideas to do so if you have them. We've been recommending more content, but they won't listen. So I plan to share your comments here in the form of an audit report and in the hopes of getting them to comply. If anyone has any good supporting data to prove the data, I'd love to see that as well. Thanks for backing me on the need for more content! Keep those recommendations coming! Thanks.