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Ah, thank you so much! Our developer had a feeling the problem had something to do with the whole http/https thing but couldn't quite figure it out. I'll ask him to make the change you suggested and we should be all set! Thanks again - troubleshooting this was turning out to be really time-consuming, so I finally posted the question here out of desperation.

It's entirely possible that indexation issues are contributing to what you're seeing, Matt. I'd also suggest reading through this Q&A thread by Rand: https://moz.com/community/q/da-pa-fluctuations-how-to-interpret-apply-understand-these-ml-based-scores

Hi Gianluca. Thanks so much for the detailed explanation! I appreciate your taking the time to provide all that great info. Unfortunately, I'm not sure what to do here. I understand the client made a mistake in launching one site for all of Europe, but I know they'll never pay to build out separate sites for each target country (at least not right now). At the risk of sounding like an annoying client, what if I was to use the "en-us" hreflang tag on the U.S. site and just "en" on the English version of the European site as a temporary fix? (Then once we launch the translated versions of the European site – in Spanish, French, and Italian – we'd tag them as "es," "fr," and "it.") Would that help at all with my issue of having the European site outrank the U.S. site in the U.S. SERPs? Thanks again for taking the time to try to steer me in the right direction. From your answers, I feel like I have a pretty good handle on what we should do in an ideal world. Unfortunately, this situation is not ideal, so I'm looking for a relatively quick band-aid fix... but I'm getting the sinking feeling that there's no such thing.

Hi Matt, In circumstances like this, it is generally down to the fact that your clients company doesn't carry the trust and authority to outrank the ticker. If someone searches for the acronym, I am assuming that most want to find the stock info, rather than your client. Of course, this is something you need to change. This can only come from building that trust. Google made a change a while back that gave more bias to brands - this is where you want to be. There is a wonderful article here on Search Engine Land that I suggest you spend some time going through as it will take you through many steps that you would need to take. The same with the article here on MOZ. -Andy

In 29 I'm seeing it under customize and there's a "Title Bar" button in the bottom left corner.

Thanks, Kyle. I was pretty sure there was no way to do it, but I appreciate your work-around suggestion. My boss wanted to see if searches for a certain company spiked in the days after they issued a press release, but it was for business development purposes (long story) and not an SEO campaogn. I thought this would be a good forum for putting the question out there though, since it theoretically involves the keyword research we all do.

View the page source (right click + view page source), look in the section.  Youll see it - <meta name="keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2" /> Tip: if theres a lot of stuff crammed into the HEAD section, just CTRL-F and search for ``` (meta name="keywords") without the parenthesis

Cool! Thanks Doug!

For the future, I'd suggest using something like Code Monitor (https://polepositionweb.com/roi/codemonitor/index.php) to monitor for any changes to your live or staging robots.txt. I've been in situations where too many people had access to the site that didn't know what they were doing, and getting an alert within 24 hours that someone changed something in robots.txt really saved us.

There are many variables involved with a redesign.  The biggest concerns being: Are you using the same url's from your previous pages?  If not, did you 301 redirect them into the new corresponding pages? More importantly, did you make sure to check which pages had links pointing at them, and make sure those were reused or redirected? Is the new redesign more efficient?  urls like domain.com/blue-widget instead of domain.com/reallylongstretchofcharacters Have you submitted a new sitemap?  Did the sitemap change? Is the website faster/slower?  Do a google speed check to see how its doing <80, you may need to make a couple minor changes. Has Google went through and indexed your website?  How many pages have been indexed? Do you have well developed content that is created with keywords in mind - without being spam? Anyway, if you made sure to 301 redirect all of the old pages, or reused the urls, you should see a recovery.  I'd advise that you do a big link building push right away, though, in order to speed up the process, as well as be beneficial all around.

Thanks for the quick response. Would the client risk being penalized by Google by leaving the old pages up?

One way it could hurt your SEO is if people who link to your site mistakenly link to .com instead of .net which could reduce your inbound links.

I have wondered about this - my impression is that since Google is quite insistent on tracking fully-qualified sub-domains that the impact of creating CNAME records for a related sub-domain would be limited. Our blog is hosted via dreamhost, whereas our store is on Volusion - a prepackeaged shopping cart solution. To implement a blog in the same domain, we'd have to create a CNAME record like blog.mysite.com and of course, have a link to it from www.myseite.com. So far, I've always believed that this would only allow for - as you said - "a portion of the value" of the links... is there any reason to believe otherwise?