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I get what you are saying about separating the new content from the sales content but I think I would still go with the sub-directory.

You have well established domain names that Google associates with the well known brand - stick with it.  Your new pages will rank for the terms for which they are relevant and when they do, the relevant traffic will go straight to those pages, never having to even see the sales copy unless they choose to click in to it.

That is how I believe I would approach this.  New domains require building authority from the ground up - absolutely achievable, we all do it... but when you have an already established, totally relevant domain.... use it.

shanrenee.com has relevant links from photography and wedding sites.

http://jmayphoto.com/index2.php#!/home does not.  Also, the URL string is funky, I don't put stock in keywords tags but this one is stuffed pretty bad - and the pages that do have content... it appears that the content is Framed...  They may have been developed by the same agency but they did not develop them in the same way at all.

Cesar,

That is what it means, yes.  However, I have seen my Titles change (meaning they have crawled) but the snapshot not change so even though they say that they cache it with every crawl I think they miss sometimes.

"this is a one time change that would affect about 800,000 pages so we want to get it right the first time around and stick with that url."

Oh yeah - I dig that.

Maybe instead of just the one word checks simply make it more broad?  Like 'Dr credentials' and 'doctor background check"?  Those would probably register and would be a bit more relevant to your campaign... maybe?

Indeed - everything I said goes equally for sub-domains.

That is what I have seen as well.  I just assumed that is just how it is.  If I did something wrong and there should have been a confirmation than I certainly have a busy weekend a head of me....

As far as the file names, I would stay away from using website design in them as it is already in your domain.  My reason for this is from practical experience:

Our clients are very locally based - meaning all of their important shopping terms include their location (city).  Many times the domain name will include the city and for a long time it was standard practice to also include the city in different file names throughout the website.  Right around the time that Panda started up we noticed those specific pages starting to drop - pages that had the city in the file name on websites that also had the city in the domain.  Now, I know that correlation does not equal causation but when I started changing file names and we started seeing rankings come back.... well... I figured it was counting as Over Optimization.

As far as your titles and headers etc... I am sure this is fine, but I would certainly stay away from having the term repeat in the absolute URL by having it in both the domain and the file name.

Cheers!

You never 'have' to use the keyword at all, actually.  Simply make sure you are writing about it and chances are you will use it exactly how many times you should.  It isn't the keywords, or more specifically it isn't mainly the keywords.  It is the surrounding text.  Are you describing your keyword?  Are you staying relevant and on topic?  And as far as your content volume I would suggest never write content for the sake of having content.  If the page requires 4k words then write 4k words.  If it requires 1k then write 1k.  Quality over Quantity.  I promise.

Cheers.

Absolutely.  It just seems that at the end of the day it's going to be a guess so the most data you can put towards it the better your chance are of choosing correctly, of course.  I just hope that when you do make your decision it ends up being correct for at least the majority of the pages.  Good luck - I have faith in ya!

I totally agree with Andy here.  PageRank is not the only metric - not by a long shot.  Any association can be negative or positive whether PageRank is passing or not.  I would disavow just to get out of the bad neighborhood.

Geo Meta tags are simply what they sound like - they are meta tags that allow you to declare your geo-location (longitude/latitude) - they may have some impact on local searches or searches using location identifiers.

Microformats are schemas used to help crawlers understand your content better.  I would recommend looking in to using schema.org formatting - or, at the very least, use V-Card formatting on your physical address in the content of your site.

As far as Dublin Core meta data - read this.  http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/

Of course you can always ask anything here in the forums but Google is a good tool too

Cheers!

Definitely don't cut yourself short.  If it takes 15k words to properly describe something then that is what it takes.  It sounds to me that you have a good handle on what you are doing.  Keep it natural and all will be well.  Good luck!

OK - I would get a list of all of your old pages and start 301 redirecting them to your new pages asap.  This could be part of your issue.

We have tested sub-folders vs. sub-domains with international clients in the same region of the same country - each received very similar SEO (on-page, links etc...) and found that neither appeared to work better than the other as far as ranking went.  However I am not clear on what they mean by 'mapped to the TLD'.  Are they saying that each language variant  has its own TLD and that the sub-folder from the main TLD will redirect to it?

instead of having different pages that are almost the same can you just make it one page that both navigation subs link to? So if you have Page A and Page B in the Navigation and Page A has a Sub nav link to Page C - rather than Page B having a sub nav link to a different page altogether why not just have it also have a sub nav link to Page C?  If they are so similar anyway can you not just combine the two similar topics in to one page?

I don't know, man.  When Barry Schwartz finally caved and no followed the paid ads on seoroundtable I figured that was about it.  The end.  He refused to do it out of principle for a very long time and then one day said 'screw it' and threw the tags on.  I have no doubt he will still get fans that wish to pay for a clearly paid spot on his site (and it has always been clearly marked as paid) but for the most part.... people buy them for the link juice.... I think it can still work for a while but Ole' Goog is getting a lot better a properly determining when a link is a TLA and seems to be coming down hard on them.  Personally I haven't used them in a very long time.

I agree with you completely.  When you get more information please post it.  I am curious.

If your client shops local universities for interns and/or employees, those universities will link to your client's jobs page from their careers page(s) as a resource for their students.  It is quite a relevant link and there are quite a few universities or colleges in OH... I'd hit them up as well as taking the on page advice that has been listed by Kade and Jesse (and anyone else that chimes in)

There is an old webmaster world thread that explains how to hide the robots.txt file from browsers.... not sure why one would do this however....

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum93/74.htm

Perhaps they are doing something like this?

Yeah, trust me, I have strongly advised against it.  They don't use us for design, just marketing, and the company they use for design (while, admittedly, very, very good) was almost done with this before we were brought in to the loop about the redesign.  Down the road I hope to convince them to add more pages etc... but for now this is what I have to work with.  I am hoping the rel=canonical will take care of the duplicate content issues while perhaps giving a bit more authority to the content sections of the one page design.  This is something I have not done before, however, and I wanted to bounce it off my peers.  Thank you for the response!  I'll come back and post how it goes in a few months.