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I would go with subfolders versus subdomains. With subfolders you draw upon the strength of your whole website. With subdomains, each subdomain has to stand on its own. (Internal page linking, backlinking and content) By keeping everything tied to your root domain, you have greater value. I've learned this by experience with our own older strategies of using subdomains. Building up a bigger site with more pages is better.

Each subfolder, with its own localized topic, will rank just fine as a page, because it is supported by your larger site.

My suggestion would be to stay with one site, and set up pages or categories within your site to address different audiences. Building more than one site will require you to do backlinking and social channel strategies for each one. Build the mother ship and point everything there. Good examples to follow are Amazon, Walmart (Who has recently jumped into the rankings over the last few years).

Rob:

If you haven't done this yet, research the keywords for your business. Make sure you use these keywords in a natural way on the pages of your website. For each page, put your main keyword in the title tag, url and H1 tag. Depending on the website platform you are using, you should be able to do this fairly easy. Make sure that you have keyword specific alt tags on all your images. Get your website listed with all the online local listing directories, especially Google places. Set up Facebook, Twitter, Google plus and Tumblr pages. Work with industry related websites to mention (citations) your business and website.

Keep in mind that all your content on your web pages and social channels need to be engaging and natural. With the launch of hummingbird, it appears that Google is looking more for themed and topic-based web pages, so give the users what you think they are looking for.

Spammy keywords might be something to look at. Although you they are not high for "marriage records" it is used twice in your title tag, and the word marriage is used 49 times. I recently did some clean up on some of my pages that were kind of spammy with some keywords and saw an improvement.

So something to consider.

The fact that you have all new URL's, even though you have 301'd all your old URL's, it will take Google time to crawl, index and rank those new URL's. It is like a whole new website, and is not currently in Google's database.

You might try going into Google Webmaster Tools, under the Crawl section, and then Fetch as Google. When it is Fetched, click on the Submit to index button, and then click the box "URL and all linked pages". It may speed up the process of Google re-indexing, but is no guarantee.

I have had to do this on numerous sites where I wanted to change to different URL structures.

It is going to be spamming your URL's with keywords that are not serving a subfolder purpose. I would focus on naturally putting your keywords into your product name in the title tag, URL and H1 tag.

I recall Matt Cutts, in one of his videos (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z07IfCtYbLw), addressing product descriptions (Scraped from the manufacturer) with E-Commerce sites, especially those sites that are selling products that a hundred, or even a thousand other retailers are selling. He said that you would be ahead of your competition if you took the time to rewrite those descriptions, so they are original and not duplicate content . It is not necessary to refresh or rewrite them every couple of months. Just having a unique description that no one else has for that product will put you ahead of everyone else selling that product.

It would be a good idea to try and get your customers to write reviews on your products and post them on your product pages. This is unique, original content that is fresh. Amazon is a good example of doing this.

Yes, I reviewed the thread over on Google product forums. Not much of a discussion on it yet. If the "not selected" metrics were accurate, it did give us some additional information. I'm all for more information from Google, not less. Taking this away may be another step for keeping us guessing.

Two things you can do:

1. Submit a site map with all those pages. They suggest breaking the sitemaps into 50,000 page groups.

2. Use the "Fetch as Google" feature in GWT and fetch your root domain then click the box to submit the root domain along with all the linked pages. This will submit the request to Google to be indexed.

I have tried to put my keyword phrase in "All in One SEO" title tag at the beginning of my tag line, following with something relevant. For example, if the headline of my page content is "How to Get the Most out of the Trinidad Carnival?" In the All in One SEO section for the title I would put "Trinidad Carnival - Getting the Most Out of It."

Do some keyword research to determine some of the longer tail keyword phrases that are using your main keywords, and try to incorporate these long tail phrases into your headline and title tags. I have found that if I do this and add a new post or page at least once per week, your page or post will be immediately indexed and ranked within seconds. Just make sure that you have a sitemap plug in that immediately pings the SERPS.

You want to look at this from what you think your user will be search for. There is a lot of traffic you can obtain through image searches. So if your title and alt tab reflect the search queries, then your images will show high on an image search.

Also, consider pinning your images in Pinterest. I have gotten a lot of traffic through Pinterest for our images, as well as some SEO link value from Google.

Rob, thanks for your input.

Previous to posting my question, I checked traffic, visits, indexing and rankings. Everything looked normal. I did some checking of some sites I have hosted somewhere else (Not the same as my main sites), and the impressions look normal.

I'm suspecting that there might be an issue with the hosting location, or Google just has a glitch with our impressions reporting for this particular login. Bottom line my traffic and rankings are okay, so I'll wait and see if Google corrects the problem.

Thanks for your input!

What's important with your meta descriptions is to make them appealing enough to get your user to click on your listing. Meta descriptions no longer add any ranking value, but they do add marketing value. Put your meta description keywords in your first sentence, as they will be bolded if they are part of the search query. Put your action or power words, (Words that would motivate your searcher to click your listing) also towards the top of your meta description. Towards the end of the description they will get cut off.

I did a similar process a couple of years ago. I had a blog on Google's blogspot, and I set up a new, self-hosted wordpress blog and transferred all my blog posts over. Both sites were getting crawled, but the new site got no rankings until I blocked Google from crawling my old blogspot site. Google saw it as duplicate content and was only giving the old site ranking value.

We are looking for an internal duplicate content checker that is capable of crawling a site that has over 300,000 pages. We have looked over Moz's duplicate content tool and it seems like it is somewhat limited in how deep it crawls. Are there any suggestions on the best "internal" duplicate content checker that crawls deep in a site?

I'm not particularly concerned. I'm banking that as Penguin 2.0 takes down my competitors spammy links, I will climb in rank. I do have competitors that have some really bad neighborhood links. So I'm counting on the update to reward us.

As for your Mom... are you the result of your Mom's one night stand?  

There are a couple of things you can do that will help your product pages rank better over your pdf pages. You can do a canonical from the pdf to the product page it is referencing, giving your product page the ranking value. You can incorporate your pdf into text (html) on your product page, giving your product page additional, relevant content, thus boasting ranking.

Need more information to give an adequate answer. There are so many factors that can influence it on both sides of the fence. (Google's side and your side) If you have not changed anything on your site and have not done any off-page SEO, then you are seeing the changes with the algorithm that is affecting your ranking. Google is making changes almost every day, and it will affect your rankings, and those of your competitors if those changes are targeting certain attributes on your pages and other's web pages. As you add more content and pages to your website, it tends to settle down on movement.

Google is getting pretty good at sniffing out webmasters trying to game the system. Just naturally put your keywords in places that make sense and try not to overdo it, and you should be fine.

HashtagHustler;

Thanks for taking the time to respond. This change is a tough one. If you've every worked for a company with in-house SEO, it is a balancing act to accommodate what Upper Management wants, and still maintain best practices, rankings and traffic.

I feel the best option is what you suggested, that of leaving the store there and addition to the home page, but upper management is not buying that option, so I'm trying to find the best way to do this without too much damage. I feel the home page will take a hit in rankings, I just want to minimize the damage as much as possible. My task is to make sure that the linking networks are carried over, move over the content and images, and then 301 the store page to the new home page.

I will probably set up a roll back plan, if the rankings tank.

As for the forum. We have a very successful forum on a sub-domain, that does very well for us. We also have an active blog.

Thanks for your input.

He needs to start with the obvious first. Take a look at Webmaster Tools to make sure Google is indexing his pages. Do a Fetch on some pages to see what Google sees. Next move would be to have a full, in depth site audit done to review all the elements of the site. Screaming Frog is a good tool for that. Then he needs to go back and explore his links again. Adding some new, relevant links will help.

I wanted to get back to report the cause of our problem with a lot of our rankings dropping. We originally thought it was due to a database crash. And that still could be affecting some things.

We moved our servers to a new location. A couple of weeks ago, we switched over to some new IP addresses. When we did so, a program started blocking Google's IP addresses because they were hitting our servers with a lot of hits, and put those IP addresses on a blocked list. So our pages on some of the websites stopped getting crawled, and thus rankings dropped. We discovered the problem when exploring our Webmaster Tools Crawl Stats and noticed that the "kilobytes downloaded per day" had flat-lined. Doing a fetch on selected pages we could see that it was not fetching the page. So after unblocking those IP addresses, the pages got crawled, our crawl stats went back up, and our rankings started going back to where they were. We still have some rankings that have not bounced back, but assume they will as new crawls re-index those pages.

A lesson learned for me was to pay attention to the crawl stats. Any drastic variations could be a sign of a problem.

Brad
iboats.com

Sure. First off, you've been asked by the linking company to do so, so you want to accommodate their request, and secondly, it will do you no harm.

I have a lot of local website clients. I use the Wordpress platform exclusively for these websites and have had phenomenal success with rankings for these sites. One particular client's site was no where to be found on Google 2 years ago. They now dominate the top three positions on Google's 1st page on over 100 relevant keywords. (These are strong head terms and not just long tail terms)

So I'm a strong supporter of Wordpress. Of course you have to work on optimizing your pages, but Wordpress makes it so easy and quick to make changes.