A couple of our main domains have disappeared from Google

[ToreyHeinz]

I work with a company that has way too many domains. Over the last year or so I have been working on consolidating them, and removing duplicate content. Yesterday I did Google search for a couple terms that we are normally number one for, and we don't show up anywhere in the first 300 results. I see no warnings in Webmaster, and I can see that this happend a couple days ago.

Here are the domains that have gone missing:
www.gaso.com
  Desc: Tons of good info about Gaso Pumps
  Tems: Gaso, Gaso Pumps

www.gasopumpparts.net
  Desc: Part Lists for specific Gaso Pumps
  Terms: Gaso Pump Parts

www.IEQindustries.com
  Desc: Company Website
  Terms: IEQ Industries

Here are some domins that still show up:
www.wheatleygaso.com
  Desc: Searchable Pump Catalog with pump specs

www.wheatleypump.com
  Desc: Used to be a "duplicate" gaso.com, but mostly has links to gaso.com now.

www.trenchless.org
  Desc: An old incomplete site

We also own a bunch parked domains that we created a generic landing page for, like:
http://www.gasopump.co/
http://www.gasoparts.co/

Many of the sites are on the same VPS server, not sure if that is causing a problem. To me it shouldn't matter, we are not trying hide anything. The sites with content serve different purposes, but we are working at consolidating them to simplfy things. The landing pages are mainly meant to park the extra domains we have.

I am not terrible concerned as we are offering legitimate products and services, and we are trying to do the right things, but my client is very concerned.

My question is this, what is your best guess as to what happened, and what should I change?

Thanks in advance!
Torey

[ToreyHeinz]

Thanks Adam,

This is the strategy I have been wanting/planning to implement, I think this temporary drop will give me the opportunity I have been looking for to make it happen.

Torey

[Adam_Cochran]

Hi Torey

For example lets say one of your websites pushed a particular type of pump (not familiar enough with the product vertical to know if that makes sense but bare with me), you'd want gaso.com/pumpa to be the landing page (page specifically dedicated to that pump type) that you direct the old domain that covered that pump too with a 301.

Gaso.com should come back, focus on it and give it sometime I understand that if this is a client site they are probably freaking out (also worth checking if perhaps they've just dropped into a Google dance and are not fully removed from the search results). Build it out with proper landers as entry points (this avoids all your search traffic coming into the main page which isn't ideal) and redirect the old websites to their appropriate internal page. This will give you a real boost over time.

If you need to explain the time process to a client let them know that this is a strategic investment in the future. The consolidation of the sites, and the time it takes for gaso.com to re-appear is about getting it done right to grow their results significantly in the long run, but work on consolidating the sites as soon as possible because it can be a real drag on both time and authority.

[EGOL]

I agree with Adam.  I grabbed a few random sentences from random pages on the site and there are lots of other sites publishing same stuff.

This might be just one problem.  A person could spend lots of time digging into every possible issue... but since you seem to have a lot of gaso sites that made me think "short cut publishing".

[ToreyHeinz]

What do you mean by "single landing pages?" Are you talk about pages under gaso.com like gaso.com/gaso-pump-parts, and then redirect gasopumpparts.net to that page?

Also gaso.com is our most "valuable" domain, but since it now seems to have disappeared from  Google, should we invest our efforts there or choose a different domain?

Thanks again,
Torey

[Adam_Cochran]

If you have a lot of duplicate content (or overlapping content) on the same server it may not be a penalty but Google simply lowering the value of the properties due to a lack of uniqueness.

Make sure as you rid of old domains you are 301 redirecting back to the main site and continue to simplify your site and consolidate it into single landing pages. Also make sure none of these old sites are inter-linking in any method other than a 301 redirect as that would have a negative impact on your SEO.

In a way I wouldn't worry too much - it's kind of what you want a push in the right direction long term. If you are going to have secondary websites they need to be unique enough (by the nature of intent) to actually warrant their on place in the search engines. If you are really just having a slightly different spin to the same intent and content each time then Google is going to continue to lower the value of the sites across the board.

I've had the same thing happen to me with old clients that started back in the day that owning multiple domains made sense, a lot of them dropped off and the clients freaked. We streamlined the content into unique and hyper targeted landing pages and 301'd the old domains - within a few weeks not only were we back up and running but we were simply crushing our competition. We shot up in SEO across the board, our traffic was up almost 30% and our users were converting at a higher rate due to ease of use.

Think about it from the user perspective and you'll always win, streamline it, make it easy, make it accessible and the rankings WILL come. (Well worth reading Cyrus' post about that mantra: http://moz.com/blog/seo-satisfaction)