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As Mike said, it could take months for Google to remove all the indexed content from the DEV side (that was crawled and indexed). Looks like you did it all right too. I wouldn't worry, let it filter out. You won't be able to rush it any faster.

Had a few minutes and wanted to help out...

Google doesn't always index/crawl the same # of pages week over week, so this could be the cause of your indexing/report problem with regards to the differences you are seeing. As well, if you are working on the site and making changes, you should be seeing these numbers improve (depending on site size of course Enterprise sites might take more time to go through and fix up, so these numbers might look like they are staying at the same rate - if your site is huge

To help with your 301 issue - I would definitely look up and download SEO Screaming Frog. It's a great tool to use to identify potential problems on the site. Very easy to download and use. Might take some getting used too, but the learning curve isn't very hard. Once you use it a few times to help diagnose problems, or see things you are working on improve through multiple crawling. It will allow you to see some other things that might not be working and get to planning fixes there too

As well, make sure to review your .htaccess file and how you have written up your 301's. If you are using Apache, this is a great resource to help you along. Read that 301 related article here

Make sure to manually check all 301 redirects using the data/URL's from the SEO Screaming Frog tool. Type them in and visually see if you get redirected to the new page/URL. If you do, it's working correctly, and I'm sure it will only be a matter of time before Google fixes their index and displays the right URL or 301. You can also check this tool for verifying your 301 redirects using the old URL and see how it performs (here)

Hope some of this helps to get you off to working/testing and fixing! Keep me posted if you are having trouble or need someone to run a few tests from another location.

Cheers!

I have worked on a few sites with issues exactly like this (Drupal, Joomla, custom based CMS), with lengthy periods of time since the changes took effect at the search level. Overall, we did see increases in traffic related to <kw>related organic traffic. My input, is although it's a lengthy process, the benefits outweigh the length of time or complexity to implement.</kw>

Shortening the URL, will increase the <kw>relation to product and brand. It also opens up doors for later expansion if needed, as you want to try to minimize the URL's length. Getting rid of that slug folder will save you character space at later points in site development, if you choose to go another level deep in URL string/folder.</kw>

Devanus is right in most likely losing some related searches to people searching for 'category product name', but in your life an experience, how many times have you actually searched for that yourself? A good thing to do would also run by your analytic's and keyword metrics from organic traffic and determine the potential loss of any traffic related to direct 'category' related product searches.

Just my 2 cents Everyone has different experiences when implementing changes like this, and it may not all be the same across the board.

Good luck. Cheers!

No problem. I think cleaning up the error's and redirecting traffic to where it should be going, is the first step in improving the user experience. If you manage to squeeze some 'juice' out of those outdated links, that's great!

You should consider using the disavow tool, when needed, but only after the a very thorough back-link analysis. This tool can be used for good

What's the domain you are working on and what are the KW's you are targeting. Graph's work, but without actionable information, it's difficult to look over and help make a few suggestions

If you want to know how I would approach this in a new light and strategy. It would take some time, planning and work to develop, but the rewards down the line would be much greater! It looks like the way you have things setup now, look like a potential link wheel of sites playing off each other with specific 'KW anchor text rich links internally.

Here's a detailed plan I would put in place. Granted this is a rough outlook without having all access and full disclosure on the sites.

1. Look to develop your Brand! Build a brand name that you can expand on product wise. Develop out 1 site which encompasses all the products you sell. Perhaps later you want to add more? Is there any reason why you could not assimilate all these sites into 1 Brand site?

2. Plan to move all products under one shell site, and plan to redirect all your traffic to the new BRAND site Work with one domain you can build on for clients, products, social, content and link building.

3. Register a new BRAND domain once you have decided on one. Make sure to remove any <keywords>from your URL and build a brand people can relate too in it's product niche. Keyword rich domains have been hurt in various niche's from the last few updates. Build something that people want to share is your best bet.</keywords>

4. Migrate all your content, products, and pages to the new domain/brand site.

5. Plan out detailed 301 redirect from all your old sites, domains and internal pages to the new MASTER BRAND site where it will hold all your products for sale, keeping some of your link value.

6. Run detailed back link profiles in OSE on the old sites, to weed out the weak one's and the make to be very thorough. Remove any back-links you don't want (many methods), and clean up the link profile until it looks very clean

7. Plan and prepare a social media strategy around your products and brand. Get the clear one's setup and build out from there as needed (specific), to aid in reinforcing the brand and site.

8. Plan a content development strategy around your products. Develop out information, product details, where they can get them, why it' better. Find linking partners through sharing information and content. Build links to external sources that relate to product in your niche. Get people talking about you and what you offer

9. This way, when you tie in the social media strategy with content development, you can handle working with one domain, and drive all your efforts to one site/domain and location.

The way you have it setup now (4 sites and 1 blog), your are turning your efforts into more work!!?? Running multiple domains, social media and content development and link building. Why would you cause yourself so much work???

Ultimately, building a brand site is the best bet. This will also help you with the link building and content development to support the domain and site.

It's a rough sketch and requires work but would pay off in the long run. The way you have it setup now, needs to be modified to succeed in the long run

Hope to see a future post once you get it all aligned and working for you!

Cheers.

Hey There, been there, done that!

The old sites' pages and value have more than likely been lost due to many things (lack of new content, no fresh content, lack of content updates, abandonment, etc). Most of the value is most likely lost over the last 2 years.

I would still map out and put in place the 301's. You will need to have an exact match of any relevant pages from the old domain - and 301 redirect them to relevant pages on the new site/domain. The back-links might still be there, and there may be some value to trickle through in old page-rank but I wouldn't count too much on the value. From a user experience, it's always best to send your customers to the right pages, rather than a site with outdated information. That won't support and help build the brand

You should also ensure that WMT in Google and Bing are configured correctly for the new site. Run profiles on both sites in OSE to map out any links that may be list. If you have access to the old profiles for WMT, check into that as well. Correct anything out of date for the profile on the site.

You may also want to map out any links in the profile that are of really high value and authority. Isolate these in a Excel file and profile them to contact later. Perhaps establishing contact with them, you can get them to find interesting material and content on the new site they would consider linking too or sharing.

All in all, first map out and complete a full 301 redirect to ensure it's in place. Map out the link profiles of both the old and new sites, and try to align things over time as the 301's take effect. Watch for any broken links and 404's in your reports and ensure those get corrected too. Don't leave anything to chance. Cover all your bases.

Cheers !

Hope some of this helps and good luck

I think you should share you sites and blogs (with links) to help us get a view and a better picture of what might actually be causing the issue

When looking to promote your material through 3rd party sites, make sure to discuss the options of rel-can. Make sure they are OK with sourcing the original files location and URL. Usually they are OK with doing this, as it's in their best interest to do

On a sidebar: Also make sure to embed any links in the PDF, White paper, infographic, or articles etc, with absolute link practices (if pointing to information on your site) use the entire URL and not just a relative path from the file located on your site/server. Because scrapers like to just 'scrape' content and publish automatically to spam sites, without either you're or the 3rd party knowledge, those links they scrape will automatically point back to internal pages or information referred to in your white paper on your site, crediting you with the link, the value and of the source original content. I like to make sure this is always done to get any credit I can when these black hat scraper sites hit work and try to re-publish.

Cheers buddy! We all work together !! Gotta love it.

If he is the one producing the content (from FDA), and it's originally written by FDA approved staff, and other sites are scraping and using his content - (providing you are the first to be crawled and indexed/noted with this content), you will be credited with the content originality. The technical structure of your site will have an impact as well as the social landscape and the way people perceive your brand online.

That's all I wanted to add to that.. Don't worry so much about the content if its your original stuff. If they are ranking higher - take some of my other suggestions, build a company blog, share news and source info about the products, highlight products, specials and promo's. Build a community people will want to come back to buy, share, and support.  Build links to the content in the blog on the company site, share the info, get you product our into the right niches and circles and I think it will all come together with time.

SEO isn't an overnight success, and I can't stress that enough to clients i work with. It takes time and patience to succeed with results that stick

Cheers!

That's pretty straight forward and almost answers itself

What you need to do is rework all the product descriptions you sell (that are/might be duplicated on 1 or 25, 50 of 100 sites). You need to work on then optimizing the framework of your site (technical work), write great compelling titles and description tags, good H1-H2 usage throughout, copy placement, integrate UGC (user generated comment) to write product reviews and notes on current inventory or sales experiences, and of course have some sort of plan sketched out for a social media and marketing push to build awareness and traffic to the site - it'll be difficult. All the while and doing all this you need to consider some sort of content development strategy (blog?) which could highlight certain products daily? weekly? monthly? Integrate that into a media delivery email campaign to gain new potential sales leads from site visitors, offer promotions too, etc? Opportunities are endless here and sometime frustrating as you work through and find the right formula that works.

I always fine these problems fun to work out. Sometimes I get carried away!

It's not an easy job, I won't lie. I recently had a client on a site for a client like that with over 1000 individual products (and that's small compared to some enterprise-level sites now) and it's a long process to do, but as you work through it, optimize it, test it, re-test it, re-work it again and again, you'll find the right formula to get those page indexed and ranking. Adding that personal touch to descriptions by re-writing them as well, gives you opportunity to leverage other potential KW's for POW (points of entry) from/through organic search, keeping in line with the primary KW's you are trying to target.

Create a great user experiences as well Look to see what the other sites are missing. Look at the site from a 'buyer' perspective', what can you improve on? image galleries? sign ups? search function to improve product location? etc.. I don't think the other sites who are ranking above you, have all that nailed down, unless they are a global client like Target, Walmart, etc, etc. There is always room to improve !!

Hope some of that helps. It should get you started for sure!

1. Remove the punctuation. Although it doesn't really damage search listings or impact how SERP's look at your site for rankings, as Chris said, you only have so many characters to work with in the <title>field and it's best to really optimize the <title> to improve end-user experience :)</p> <p>2. Craft custom <titles> for each and every page, and consider where you place the KW in the field. Importance will be taken into account as well as position and meaning of the KW in relation to the <title>. Try mixing things up to see where you impact ranking positions. I would still remove all punctuation (but perhaps, keep a few pages ranking now, with punctuation to see if you impact the rankings) See #3 below.</p> <p>3. Look at choosing a few test pages in the domain to work with to monitor rankings for this very test, and analytic's data like bounce, exit, click through, etc. </p> <p>4. Doing this will also help you reveal how the customer reacts to the page once they click in, after the find it in the organic SERP listings. Did the punctuation impact your rankings, and if so, was the click through higher, while also decreasing the bounce and/or exit rates from said pages from end-user? A great experiment and test platform :)</p> <p>It's not an exact science, but more a art and science mixed together ;). I wish you all the best with this, as it sounds very interesting. Keep us all posted on your findings!!</p> <p>Cheers.</p></title>

I ran a speed test on the domain as Chris mentioneed it was running slow. I did get the domain to load, but it took a lot of time to get a visual of the site's design. Try using the following tool to run some speed tests, determine where things might be slowing down (host, server, # of files loading, # of image files loading, quality of images, resolutions, remote files and CCS scripts, etc).. could be a # of things but this is a good place to start investigating. Just enter your domain here and run the test.

http://tools.pingdom.com

It will also help you identify areas that might need looking at to help speed things up. Hope this is a good jumping off point

Cheers

A great place to start, just remember that tools like this usually come with a yearly or monthly fee, so budget for it Enjoy. I like using these tools.

http://home.sproutsocial.com/social-analytics

Jesse's right. AS much as your client doens't want to upgrade and rework the entire site (build an equivalent in HTML or PHP), there isn't much you can do. This is a full FLASH site, locked SWF and Google isn't going to crawl or index any of the content or information.

You could do a few other things to help the business on a local level:

1. Build up all the social profiles and media needed to support Google local search. Social media, Google+, FB and Twitter sould be a good start. Even a LinkedIn profile to support the company and business.

2. Add in a WORDPRESS customization feature to the site, and build up a blog for content marketing and development. Work to create content around each of these categories and redirect users back to the company site. You don't have specific landing page URL's to use and optimize, but it's a cost effective start if they are unwilling to bend on going the route that will benefit them the most.

I've had clients like this and it's the hardest thing to tell them everything they have or are doing is wrong on many levels. It's probably the most sensitive area when dealing with a client you don't want to upset Tough road ahead for sure.

Cheers!

It all depends if you want (or are going too):

1. Short URL's usually work best with regards to indexing and product correlation (too long means characters get left off by Google when indexing). Keep things within a short URL length also helps Google index the full length and get the full value of the URL - using your <keywords>to reinforce the URL relation.</keywords>

• Also - Having these URL's linked too from the main page will help flow 'link juice' through the site, providing you keep the amount of links on the homepage to a minimum amount, and mix with other links that are <nofollow>. Usually links beyond 100 will not be crawled by Googlebot.</nofollow>

• Also - If your URL's are strings - make sure to have 301's setup for URL's that include any type of string (?=question123456 or something to that alignment) Make sure to change that string = www.domains.com/keyword-rich-content. This might be nothing for the site/domain you are working on, or might be a step that needs to be included in the site's overhaul project work.

2. Longer URL's (like adding directories or sub-folders) can be good too, depending on your product breakdown in you site architecture. It might not be needed though. If you have hundreds of thousands of products, directories will most likely be needed to sort the data and organize the database being used to work alongside the CMS. Then you would want to go this route, other than having an unorganized ROOT directory with thousands of pages in it (even if dynamically generated)

Each option works, in their own way. Each with supporting documentation and methods. Just something to consider in helping you steer the SEO sea

Cheers!

Sorry to hear it. Been there, and had to deal with it also! Read this over to help you understand the best practice. It's a great learning piece that will help going forward SEO Redirection practices and the SEO guide to HTTP status Codes by Dr. Pete. Another great piece and article.

It sounds like the a 302 temporary redirect is the best practice if you are only redirecting the site for 4-5 days. Then you can remove the redirect after the site is back up after the DNS failure taking place.

Cheers!

Just something to add if you want to consider this in your planning scope. My proffesional opinion is surely sub-folders, keeping away from sub-domains (unless for a very specific reason needed).

1. If you are building a multilingual site, you should also consider how you will be building back-links through various methods (content development, company blog, etc) and will those be done in each language to support the authority needed to build rankings in each language you are working to expand on?

2. If you are going to be building different divisions of the domain (Chinese, and perhaps later going French, German, etc), consider building out TLD's for each domain that's needed in specific languages and focus on building those separate sites. That way you can focus on content development, social media and marketing efforts specific to each language, thus improving your options for the search in each country.

Just some thoughts to think about depending on the scope of your project and sites.

Cheers!