Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks for your perspective, Trevor.

Do this, go to the homepage and look at the number of comments that posts in the Moz Blog receive.  What do you see?  40?  60?  80?  Something with a lot of activity might get over 100?

Now, go into the post and examine those comments.  Many of them are fan posts.  Some of them are comments by people who "don't get it" (sometimes I am in that group).

The genuine engagement is often 1/2 or less of the total comments at most, by my count.

When I compare that to what I believe the stature of Moz is in the search industry and the number of people who visit the blog, those are low numbers.  Really low numbers.  In my opinion.

In an industry where there is so much uncertainty and so much data, I would think that the engagement and debate would be a lot higher, and the amount of diverse opinion would be a lot higher.

Why is that?  We could list a hundred reasons or more.   Competitive industry and don't want clients or boss seeing secrets being revealed.  Lack of time.  Earning money is more important and don't want boss or clients seeing time being spent.  Hesitant to disagree with the poster because of Moz fans.  Hesitant to disagree with poster because he/she is world famous.  They think TAGFEE means you gotta love everything.  Not motivated to do the research and writing required to present a good argument that contradicts world famous expert and a big tribe of fans. Don't want to come back several times to engage in protracted debate.   (And many people spend an hour typing a big, researched, passionate comment, only to see it disappear when the "post response" button is pressed.)  I could go on.  I understand why the engagement isn't higher.

So, I think that in addition to comments, the  Moz Blog needs a way that people can quickly give feedback.  Make it quick and you will get more.  Expect people to write and you will find that people hate writing.  They really hate writing.  Everybody knows that you gotta pull teeth to get content, right?

Many of us are online merchants and we daily receive one to five star feedback from our customers along with one or two sentences.  Lots of customers do that because it is quick and easy.  As merchants we  often make business decisions based upon their very brief input.  I think that can happen at Moz.   Yes, you will have trolls, haters, idiots and people who "didn't get it" responding.  If those comments are attributed to member names then the reader and the poster will have some ability to place value on them.

So I would encourage Moz to find a way to get this quick feedback from the many busy people who visit and I think that will help the participation rate and give feedback that is more meaningful than a simple up/down vote.

Hello Chris,

We did not go with Google Trusted Stores.  I thought that it would be very difficult to get a lot of reviews.

Instead we went with ShopperApproved and are happy with the results.  We are getting our star ratings in the organic SERPs and the SA staff are very helpful.

Good luck.  Hope you can explore the many options with them.

I spent one of my careers in academia and understand some of the thinking that occurs there.

So you have a university that most likely has a strong reputation and an enthusiastic clan.   That strong reputation supports your rankings in the search engines and the enthusiastic clan supports your visibility in social media.

The conference center wants to leave that to form their own identity?

Maybe they don't realize that starting a new, tiny, unknown website is going to separate them from the strong reputation of the university that will support their rankings in search and separate them from the enthusiastic clan that can promote them in social media.

That reputation and enthusiasm will contribute to the success of the conference center if they remain on the university website.  That's just how search engines respond to established powerful sites compared to how they respond to new, tiny, unknown websites.

Honestly, I gave you a technical answer on why they should want to remain on the university website.  Artistically and socially, they can have the same content on the university website that they could post on a separate website.  Their portion of the university website could look "as they like it" between the university header and university footer.

If they are proud of their association with the university and the university is proud of them then, in my personal opinion, that is the way it should be.  And if that does not exist then I think that the question is more administrative than technical.

I know of situations where a university group needed an actively managed website and the university IT department was unable or unwilling to give staff time to that - and unwilling or unable to allow them to manage their own portion of the university website.  That can be frustrating to the group.  There are also situations where a university group has to pull teeth to get the formatting that they need.  Here the staff support is present, but it is just uncooperative.    So, I would explore with this group to see if this is not a question of "support" or "policy".  And, you always have the possibility that the group is simply composed of especially free spirits.

If you are referring to the "stinky" nature of these ads, then my personal opinion is "yes".  Although, I have not seen any formal studies where someone devised tests to determine the impact upon the brand.   I don't run them on my site because I think that they can damage the credibility of my content when those types of ads are adjacent to it.   So, instead, I promote my own content, hoping to earn additional pageviews and the income from other forms of advertising that will come with those pageviews.

but click rates for these are really low - 1% of readers click to read a story from this.

"Most popular stories" widgets are usually really valuable.  Don't replace the widget until you test a better version.

If you go to some of the big news sites, at the bottom of articles you will see the content marketing ads run by Taboola, Outbrain, ContentAd, Gravity and Adblade.  These have big, juicy, provocative images and quite honestly, they are a bit stinky.   However, you can learn something from them.  Learn their format and try a widget with very attractive images about your articles, with a caption that elicits clicks.  I think that you will get more than one percent click rate.

IF "Most popular stories" does not work then try "Related Stories"..... Really nice images are very important for these to succeed, but they can succeed spectacularly if you have the right kind of image and content that catches the visitor's desire for more.

Look at the Gravity ads on the bottom of this Forbes article.

ADDED:   Since you are a news site, you might make a "most recent" widget because people are looking for the fresh news.

Something important about running "most popular" and "related stories" widgets.  If you have them on a page that is sleepy content or uninspiring the visitor might not be motivated to click your widget because they expect to find "more of the same".  Including sleepy or uninspiring content in the widget will assure that it will not be clicked.  Good images and spectacular images can perform very differently.  Strive to have spectacular images.

Also, the widgets need to be updated frequently.  If you have lots of returning visitors, if they have already seen your widget and clicked the interesting items, showing that same widget over and over again will produce worse results.  We update our widgets several times per hour with all different content.

If you pay them, then they put you on their second network of sites.

my industry lacks this and the quality of information

I could open my site to articles from outside people.   But, the problem with doing that is that many people will not meet my editorial standards.   It's amazing how much total crap people send me for consideration (and I am not asking for article submissions).

A lot of work would be required to bring the typical guest post up to my publication standards.  A better use of my time is just to write the content myself.   So, I write almost all of the content for my site myself (and send my writing out to professional editors who charge more to edit my work than most people pay their writers for content production - I am not complaining about the price of my editors, instead I am just giving my opinion on the quality of typically submitted content).

Keep in mind that "opinion" content is very different from "factual" content.  If your blog is opinion then getting acceptable content might be easier than if you are publishing factual content where accuracy and precision are essential.

There are only a few authors who have passed my content approval for factual content.  If you like quality work, it might be very hard to find and hard to reject after you ask people to submit it.

Just my two cents.

One of my retail sites has more informative content about the product niche than all of my retail competitors and manufacturers combined.  Most of the traffic entering this site comes in through content pages.  Most of those visitors never see the homepage.... but they learn that we are the site with the info.  Lots of people leave reviews .... "this site has great info, we buy there because they have answered our questions".  So, if you are in a niche such as DIY then the content approach will work really well.  All of that info reduces the number of people who write or call for information.  It was a great investment.

Only 5.5% of the impressions on this site are on the homepage.  About 20% of the homepage is dedicated to showing off our content.  The top right corner of the site is a 300x250 rectangle that shows comments by customers who reviewed us today.

but time on our hands to make changes and start projects.

Transform the site from a retail site into an informational site with a small store.

I am currently reviewing my strategy when it comes to categories and tags on my site.

Everyone should do this.  I do it once every year or so.

Having been no-indexed for some time, and having many tags with just one entry I am thinking that this is not optimal for SEO purposes.

I agree.  I don't use tag pages.

Categories - Change these to Index, but only after adding a hundred words or so by way of introduction (see this example).

Where I have used categories, I wait until I have a substantive amount of material to appear on the category page.  I visited your sample page and can't tell if the hundred words or so at the top is yada yada yada content or real beef.  If it is real beef then go with it.  If it is yada yada yada then wait until you have a large enough number of posts that your page is of substantive length.

Also, I run periodic traffic assessments on my category pages.  If some of them are not bringing in the traffic or at least showing traffic growth then I delete them (301 redirect to the blog homepage).  My philosophy is that a compact site competes better for difficult, high-traffic terms if it does not have a lot of useless pages.

I am thinking of deleting all tags with just one entry,

Yes, these never should have been created.

and trying to merge those with just two or 3 entries where it makes sense

If this is going to create pages that compete with category pages then just delete them.

I will keep these as no-index, but I think this will mean more optimal distribution of link juice within the site.

In my opinion, tag pages are dangerous if they have snippets of the same content that appears on category pages and on the main blog page and its paginations.  Also, tag pages that are same topic as category pages are a bad idea in my opinion.

If you are not indexing pages they will pull zero traffic from search.  If you have links to them then you linkjuice is being scattered into potentially low-value pages.  I am all about internal linking but keep my philosophy that compact sites compete more strongly for the difficult queries where the big traffic is earned.

These are my outreach tools, though some might not call them that name, but they keep my work in daily contact with thousands of  people who are interested in my industry.

** A news page on my website where I post links to industry news stories on other websites and any new content that is posted on my own site.  This page is visited by about a thousand people per day.

** An RSS feed of the links to news stories described above that goes out via Feedburner to a few thousand people.

** A Feedburner email list of several thousand subscribers who want to receive the list of story links described above.

I am not an outreach kind of person.  I don't want to schmooze people.  Instead I just do my best to post what people want, and allow them to opt in for a daily RSS, or email, or visit to my news page.  You will not get this overnight.  But if you are dedicated to featuring everyone in your industry who is doing something good, lots of people will want to hear this stuff.  Then, when you publish something new.... BAM... it goes out to your whole tribe and they share it with other people for you.

Once people see you doing this, a few of them will send you great stuff to feature.  That will make your job easier.

So, instead of schmoozing people and sending your stuff out to Mailchimp and all of these other services, build something good on your own site and let other people promote your stuff for you.

I believe that this is going to be such a tiny tiny benefit that it might move you up from position 998 to 997, but if you are in the top 30 positions in the SERPs it will have zero impact.

It is also possible that the longer your description, the smaller the impact on any keyword.

I would invest my time in short, hot descriptions that elicit clicks.

When you are going after long tail traffic the queries that you might connect with are  A) infinite in number;  B) diverse in their wording;  and,  C) extremely low in volume.

Because long tail word sequences usually have a low volume it is best not to fuss about getting    precisely    the     right    word   sequence.   Instead, it is best to write using natural language.

It is more important to increase the diversity of words on your page.  You can do that by writing about paintings of mule deer for your den, framed prints of whitetail deer on the edge of a cornfield for your office,  matted photos of fawns in the laurel for the nursery, a water color of an eight point buck by the lake for above the fireplace at your camp.    Note we are diversifying the deer, their environment, the room where they will be displayed, the medium and the mountings -- all on the same page.

This diversity allows you to present a substantive article that will be qualified to appear in search for an enormous number of keywords and even though you never mentioned exactly a "framed painting of an eight point whitetail for your den" on this page, if someone searches for it this page of content is qualified to appear in search for it and if your website has a little power, this page might rank well for it.

Also, people buying paintings might shop deep into the SERPs or view the image results.  So even if you are not at the top of the first page of the SERPs you might still get some action.  And, load pages like these up with a number of images because image SERP shopping can pull in conversions for this type of merchandise.

Thanks!  

I have a couple domains that I paid five digits for the domain only.   For those domains, if I could get the .org and the .net for a reasonable cost, I would buy them.  But, they were registered and gone a long time ago.  I would not pay a $12.50 per year registration fee for a domain extension from another country.

If you have thousands of people per month typing your domain into search and addresses boxes then registering and redirecting typos is more valuable.

what is the point of spending thousands of dollars to own all these variations?

I would allow them to expire and spend the savings on beer.

Would we be better off just building unique copy on the main site and not focus on the 5-10 websites we would need to deal with?

You are right!   This is rubbish.

If you have time to create the 200 to 500 pages of unique content that they are asking for you should put that same effort into your main site.

If they got in touch with me, I would tell them that Google has been killing these hotdog stand websites for at least ten years.

"Site Mark-up is Abnormally Small"

Nice work.  In the opinion of many people, this is a good thing.  I want my mark-up to be small too.

Make a really strong password.

See thread here...  The Easter Bunny Took My Traffic

I have been writing for about 40 years and have worked under a few different editors.  After all of that coaching, my writing can still be improved.  To help with that, I still submit my important writing to a paid editor who reviews it critically and suggests ways to improve clarity, emphasis, grammar, and punctuation.  Having a good editor improve an article can cost more than many publishers are willing to pay to have their articles written.  It all depends upon the quality that you hope to achieve.

If you have concerns about your writing a professional editor might help you improve.  I have used Scribendi academic editing and am happy with their work.

Congratulations.   I am glad that you are focused on quality.

I don't do guest blogging but I receive requests and proposed articles from lots of people.  It is really, really rare that I publish one because they are mostly horrible.  So if you got one accepted on a nice blog and received their compliments that is a big accomplishment.

Nice work!

About ten years ago I produced a collection of pages that contained definitions of about fifty words and one photo with a short caption.  They pulled in a bit of traffic.  Since then I have been upgrading these pages.  They were initially improved to about 500 words and two or three graphics, then most were  improved to long articles of between 1000 and 2000 words with data tables, photos and graphics.   Each time I have upgraded them their performance has improved.  These improvements have been in rankings and also in traffic.  A fifty word article does not have much keyword diversity but a 2000 word article has lots of different words to pull in long-tail traffic.

Does size matter?  My answer is a definite YES.

Does size produce ROI?   That's more difficult to answer.   I can produce 50 words and a photo with caption in under an hour.  Improving that to 500 words might take me a day.  Producing a comprehensive article of 2000 words with eight to ten images and data tables might take three or four days.  The longer your article gets the more research you have to do and the longer that research takes because with length you can be digging into info obscura.  I would not want to improve these to 15,000 words because that would require an awful lot of work, people would not read the entire thing and I don't think that the traffic yield would pay back my time.

I conclude that I make decent money with the 500 to 2000 word articles (sometimes up to 4000 words for some topics)  and that's what I am sticking with.  If one of these articles is pulling in massive traffic, I often write additional articles on subtopics.  These are great for listing on the page as "additional readings".   They pull in traffic from search and they get additional pageviews from people who are already on the website.

ADDED:   SEO performance is going to be influenced by visitor engagement and sharing.  Both of those will not happen with low quality content.  So content quality is more important than word count.   I have some pages that consist of a few hundred words and one good image.  One of these pages gets millions of visits per year.  It has nothing to do with length.  The image is great, the content is good, the search volume is massive and this page ranks well.

I changed domains a while ago and dropped badly in the rankings.  The original domain was popular and getting a lot of type-in traffic and domain query traffic - many thousands of these per month.  I believe that these were supporting it in the rankings.

When the new domain went up it was suddenly getting zero domain queries and type-in visitors.  But over six or so months those strengthened and now it is back at the top of the SERPs, holding positions 1 and 2 with over 10,000 domain queries per month.

Just an opinion, I would not change my domain to metro-manhattan.com.   I would go buy metromanhattan.com.   If your domain has any popularity at all then a lot of people are typing in that domain name.

Compared to most others, my articles are usually long, ranging from 1000 to 4000 words.

I don't think that I would publish a single article that is 15,000 words unless there was no way to break it down, such as a long story.  However, if it is informative content, I would probably break it into at least three or four shorter articles that are stand-alone about a single topic.

The New York Times has a lot of really long articles (10,000 words plus).  I honestly don't like them because they take too long to read.  If they can't break them into multiple short articles then I think that they should simply shorten them.

If these events are recurring, like once per year.  Then I would make a permanent page for them.

If that event is featured on other websites then I would make sure that the next upcoming event is always on the page and always reflected in the title tag.  People will search for it with the year....  "2015 Spring Widget Dealer's Convention"   The bigger the event the more important this is.

I attend a couple of events regularly and  I search for them a few times each year.  I can't remember the URL of their website so I just google the name of the event.  I want to mark next year's event on my calendar, I want to see what they have on the preliminary schedule, I want see a final schedule, I need a map, I am looking for deals on lodging.  Event sites can get multiple visits from attendees each year.  Lots of websites have info on this event but only one of them does a great job.  I remember the URL when I see it in the SERPs.  It is also usually the only URL that has the current year in the title tag.  Other webmasters doing update their title tags promptly or don't include the year.  That's a mistake because google suggest shows a year.

A friend of mine maintains a massive event calendar with all of the events in this industry listed in chronological order on a huge LONG page.  He gets tons of traffic because he is the only person who puts this work into it.  Lots of people  know his site because of this calendar.  Lots of websites link to it.  I have an industry news blog and link to his events page every time I see that he has updated it (about six times per year).   I have a robot monitoring it   Lots of people click from my blog to his page every time I list it.  Events pages can be valuable if you do a great job on them.

What are you thoughts on a strategy like that?

I would not do them.  As long as there is other work that could be done on the site, I would not be writing about irrelevant topics.

I don't know anything about hacks, so I can't address that question.

The site appears to be South African.  I would get in touch with them and tell them to take the content down.  If that does not work immediately  I would file DMCA with google to remove them from the Google SERPs if that is your branded content on their website, or your authorship or your images.

If only one site is doing this then you might be able to solve it easily.  If it spread to multiple sites then you could be in for a problem.

Just a story...

I had a retail website and we started selling a number of outdoor products were manufactured in China.  We spent a lot of time taking great photos to show the features of the products and writing our best content to describe and sell the product.    Things were going great.  We were ranking for generic product names (like "winter sleeping bag"), pulling in some traffic and making some sales.

Traffic into these pages started to slow, sales started to drop, and we wonder what is wrong.  We go out into the SERPs and discover lots of Chinese websites (with English language content)  had grabbed our content, our images and were now selling same merchandise or were simply displaying the merchandise with ads.  These websites were all hosted in Asia.   My website was being filtered from the Gooogle SERPs.  There were not five or ten of these websites.  Our content was on several hundred of other websites - all hosted in Asia.  If you emailed them about content theft they would not respond.

My sales dropped to a really low level.  The only people buying these products were entering my site for other keywords.  These pages were getting almost no traffic from search.  I stopped restocking this merchandise and eventually  donated thousands of dollars worth of gear to my local Goodwill Industries.  I did that because the amount of work to DMCA all of these sites was very high and that work might not result in getting them taken down and my site restored to a strong selling position.

Good luck.  This is not an easy problem to solve.

As you know... there is a lot of competition for these keywords.  They are big money.  This is not easy turf to take.

Tossing out a few ideas....

This site has tons of content.   So, I would put most of my effort into local results, which does not seem to have gotten the same level of attention.

I see the site in the local results and on the map when I search for many different terms.  I would review the site thoroughly to be sure that every possible thing has been done for local and review all of the off-site efforts for ranking in the local results.

The site heavily targets the preferred medical terminology such as "breast augmentation".  However, there are common usage terms such as "breast enhancement" that get decent amounts of search but few are optimizing for.  Also the longer tail "breast enhancement surgery".   There might be lots of opportunities there.

This site has a ton of content.  There is a lot of content (multiple pages) on many of the primary topics.  In my opinion that calls for either... A) category pages..... or...  B) beefing up the primary topic page into a category type page.  This site has over 100 pages about breast augmentation.   So, I would pick the best and most meaningful of these pages and add links to them in the sidebar or at the bottom of the primary topic page and all other same-topic pages on the site.  Make it look as nice as possible.  Use titles that are as different and in-demand as possible.

I would also make category pages that are a master list of these articles, placing the best at the top, making sure that their titles are different and distinct.   Then, a link to these category pages would be in that collection of links that will appear on all same-topic pages.

I believe that a main topic page should have a copious number of links out to other same topic pages on the site and to a category page that lists all good and distinctly different articles for that topic.  My sites of similar size all rely on category pages and primary pages with lots of similar topic links.  These are the big traffic producers and the pages that perform the best in the SERPs for the most difficult keywords.

That's what I would do.  This is by no means a comprehensive review.  A person could spend a lot of time reviewing the site and its off-site assets.

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Had to leave... back now to continue....

Why did I suggest the extra links to related content or the category pages?   I believe that a page that links out to many related-content pages is more highly optimized than a page that does not.   Pages on my site that do this perform very well.

One comment that I have about this site is that it has a LOT of content.  However, I think that a lot of that content either was produced without a master plan or it is not being properly used.  The physician who owns this site should ask these questions.....

A) What are the most common questions asked by a person who has procedure X done?

B) What information do I want the person who has a procedure done to have but they do not ask?

The site should have all of these articles.  And these are the most important articles to link to from the main topic page of that procedure.   This information presented for easy access for every visitor is an indication of a good website.  Also, google knows what questions are most commonly asked about these topics because that is what people are searching for.   If the master page on this website has links to these most commonly asked questions then it is much more relevant than the list of six "related blog articles" that currently appear on the master pages for each procedure.   I would replace those with "Common patient questions" and "What your physician wants you to know".   Now you have a better website.

I visited the blog and noticed that it contains a lot of articles that are not on the topic of the physicians practice....

** 5 Must-Visit Places in Las Vegas

** 3 Reasons both men and women should practice yoga

** What do green tea, sleep and toothpaste have in common for your skin.

In my opinion, these are a waste of bullets.  Dr. Lane Smith should spend his time whipping this website into a better resource for the visitor.  He should know the important questions that everyone asks, what they need to know but are not asking, and the information that would surprise them.  Get all of those articles written and organized on this website.  If they are on this website they are not presented in an organized collection of documents where the visitor has quick and easy access to them.   Doing this will better serve the visitor and better optimize the website.

Anyone who responds here is going to be shooting into the dark.

The disavow file might have a technical flaw.  The disavow file might not address all problems.  The content could be targeting common keywords.  The content might be pedestrian.  The low hanging fruit might have been picked already.  Serious competitors from the early days of the web might be commanding the SERPs.

The only way to get valuable input instead of receiving shots in the dark that might completely miss the target is to have a detailed review of the site done by a very experience person.   That is quite a bit to ask in a Q&A question, but if you don't have problems with putting the domain out in the forum you might get specific input that is actionable.

Are these doorway pages?

Doorway pages are a cluster of very similar, low-effort required pages that are produced for no reason other than to generate search traffic.

I don't think that you are going to get a rock solid answer.  In my opinion, you will only get opinions unless Google is giving an official answer.

In my opinion, what you describe are ARE doorway pages.  They are a little better than "cookie cutter pages" that simply swap the name, address, phone, etc. in and out between pages,  Google has been killing cookie cutter pages for at least ten years, though some have survived for at least that long.

The pages that you describe have a higher chance of survival but if anyone was going to produce a massive number of these pages they would start taking conscious or unconscious short-cuts that would probably make them moderately vulnerable to an algorithmic penalty.

If you want to do a good job on these pages.  Get the manager at each location to take a photo of the building, take a photo of the staff, write text about the physical location with a google map, write a little about the staff including their names, describe some of the jobs done in that area, include photos of their work if possible.  Hold their annual bonus until they hand in this work.  Hold next year's and each subsequent year's until they have a fresh update.

What did the reviewer do?   First, this is a person who has a lot of knowledge about me and my websites from doing work on them several times over a period of several years.  I told the person to review the entire site and give me a list of the things that they would do if the website belonged to them.  I offered access to analytics and would answer any questions.

I got back a big "to do list" that would significantly improve the site and require lots of work.  Doing the tasks on the list cost many times more than the review.  My problems have been solved but I am still working on the list because the list will improve the site.

In the past couple of years, I have had some challenges with my own sites.  Each time I made up my mind what was wrong but also got paid opinions before I took actions.  I wanted to get objective opinion - from smart people.  Also, from experienced people who have looked at a lot more websites with problems than I have.

When a Google algo is causing problems for your website, nobody outside of Google can tell you with 100% certainty exactly what needs to be done, even people within Google can not tell you with 100% certainty.  Why?  Because there are many algos that can hit your site, all worked on and understood by different people  -  iff - they understand them.

So, anytime a website that is important in supporting a business needs help. I would always suggest outside advice - no matter who owns the site.

I don't think that you will get anything but guesses to your questions because a variety of things could be causing this problem.  I certainly would not take action on any advice given with multiple potential causes.

If this was my business, I would hire someone who understands the various Google algos that can change the rankings of websites, have them assess both sites, and then give you advice on what might be the cause and what might be the cure.

Wow... look at the spam scores on those Italian religious sites.  I'll bet they have gambling links to their bingo schedules.  

Don't feel bad.   The Pope's site shows the same thing.

hmm...  It could be someone manually grabbing your content.... or a robot such as qualys that is visible to your analytics.

I've had both.

I work at an office.   My office with a couple employees.

I started making websites while working at a full time job.  Eventually I had to quit something and quit the job.

You sound like a dedicated person.  I respect the posts that you make here.  You are obviously good at your work.

So, think about building a couple websites of your own.  You might need to work for someone else while you do this but eventually you might be able to work entirely for yourself.

Very strange.  That Yelp page is simply a listing of locksmiths in Phoenix.  This company is not listed in the top ten.

No address other than "Phoenix, AZ" listed for this company.  You can search for the exact company name and not find them.

When a video does not work for me, I try watching it in a different browser.  That usually works or the different browser tells me that a plugin is needed and that can often be fixed with a click.

Hope this helps if you have not tried it already.

These titles are so close that google is probably flipping a coin.

What are things I should check?

Proofread the title tags.   Be sure that the one that you want to rank is the best optimized.

These were Google Consumer Surveys, that function similar to a paywall.  The visitor lands on the site and can see part of the article - a couple paragraphs.  The survey covers the rest of the article.  The visitor is asked to answer a survey (usually one question) and if the survey is answered access is granted to the visitor and the webmaster earns $ for each question answered.

If you go to the webpage below you can see a screenshot of The Daily Globe with the survey covering most of the article.

http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/publishers

Matt Southern talks about revenue here...

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-offers-new-way-monetize-site-content-embedded-consumer-surveys/119723/

If your bounce rate goes up, your rankings might go down.

If people stop recommending your site, your rankings are not going to rise like they otherwise would.

I dumped out buckets of money when I took the surveys off.  Buckets.

This is a complex question that requires lots of study before giving an answer.

As a generalization, consider these two things...

1. If these two sites have very different content and very different link profiles then merging them will probably be a good idea.  But, if they have a lot of similar content and similar link profiles then merging them could result in a reduction in total traffic.

2. Usually it is best to merge the weaker site into the stronger site.  Usually.

I have sites that I could merge but I don't do it because I am confident that is much more profitable to run them separately.

Your sites might have two different biz models.  One could be very visible and sell lots of merchandise at MSRP and high profit.  The other might be a discount site that ranks deeper in the SERPs and gets sales from the people who dig hard to find bargains.  This allows you to play both games.

In B&M, it is possible to run two toy stores in the same town.  Although they compete with one another they are two stores out of five instead of one store out of four.  Remember there are only ten organic positions on the first page of google and if you hold two at the top that is awesome.

In general, I like ads and make my living by publishing a website that displays them.

I don't like interstitial ads because they are an annoyance and they require effort to close.   I see them a lot on Slate and Forbes.  If I didn't like some of their authors I would avoid those sites because of their interstitial ads.   Forbes runs other ads that I really dislike and would not run them on my own website.

I have a section on one of my websites that links out to eight to ten news stories per day on other websites.  I often see an interesting story on a site where my visitors are going to be hit with an interstitial ad, and before I include that story in my news I look to see if there is superior coverage of the same story on a website that does not display interstitial ads.

Would I run interstitial ads on my website?  Probably not.  I ran Google Surveys for a while (which are really similar to interstitials) but got rid of them even though they were paying buckets of money.   My bounce rate became horrible after they were placed on the site.  So, I figured that they were short term income and a long term decline in the popularity of my website.

I don't have clients.  I work on my own websites.  Some are retail monetized by sales, some are informational monetized by ads.

The best place to start with ads is Google Adsense.  Their website has all of the information that you need and lots of sample websites to learn how itworks.  To make money that way you need to produce content of high enough quality that it attracts an audience or attracts a lot of traffic from search and social.