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If Google has multiple websites using the same content, then they have to decide which one to display.  In some of these situations they erratically display one site and then another which can produce the symptoms that you described.

I went to your website and copy/pasted sentences, which should have been unique to your website, into the google query box between quotations.  The results show that verbatim sentences, verbatim paragraphs, and even verbatim page content exists on other sites.

So, if I was in your situation, the first thing that I would do is spend the time required to produce a unique website.  If you did produce a unique website then infringers are taking it and using it.... and that is a different problem with a different and more difficult solution.

I am of the firm opinion that other people using your content will cause problems with your rankings and those problems can be severe.  We have found that one powerful competitor or a large number of pissants using your content can be deadly.

So, we have consulted with an attorney and are ready to respond in various ways.  These include:  informal infringement notice sent by me, formal notice sent by the attorney, DMCA complaint filed through Google's DMCA dashboard, DMCA complaint sent directly to the host, complaints of infringement sent to Adsense.  The complaint route(s) taken are determined by the severity of infringement, who is infringing, the success of first notice, and numerous other things.

We have sent complaints about infringement against hundreds of other domains.  The infringers have included, spammers of various kinds, law firms of all sizes (usually their SEO or webmaster is the culprit), retail competitors, information sites, a state supreme court, a police department, major ecommerce... its surprising who does the infringing and where it happens.

Most of the time infringment is innocent rather than criminal.  Upstanding businesses usually respond quickly to an informal notice of infringement with...  1) thank you for letting us know, 2) we are sorry that this happened, 3) we are educating the people involved, 4) this problem will be fixed promptly.  Weasels don't respond and we go straight to DMCA, hosting complaint and a complaint to their monetization source.

I suggest contacting an attorney who practices copyright law and meet to develop a plan.  From my experience, attorneys cost less than you fear and are more valuable than you expect.   We consulted with a few law firms and found one who matches our idea that most infringement is innocent and people will respond properly.

Once you have a plan in place and understand Fair Use, the strength of your position, and the goal that you desire, you are then in position that you can file several DMCAs to Google or send several informal notices by email in under one hour, or send a URL to the attorney and he will send standard or customized letter at a cost that is not damaging to your business.

None of the above constitutes legal advice and I am not an attorney.  The above is all of the comments that I am able to provide on this subject.

I agree with Steve that there is a lot of flux in SEMrush lately.   My take on much of the flux is below.....

• SEMrush Position tracking is showing a lot of false flux lately for a couple of reasons.

  1)  They don't identify your position in the SERPs and report it as "not in top 100".  If you click to see the cache that they used to obtain the rankings your domain is there.

  2)  Google has been inserting and removing a link to the image results at the top of many SERPs.   "Images for [your query]"   When present, SEMrush is counting this link to the image results as position #1 and the result is all results below are pushed down one position.  When not present, all of the results below move up one position.  You don't notice this very much in your visibility score if you are on the second page.  However, if you have keywords that rank in the top three or four it can make a huge change in your visibility score.

  And...   Google does seem to be experimenting a bit and even losing track of a few pages for the keywords that they typically rank for.   So, yes there is a little more flux in Google, but the number changes in many of the tools are a result of contaminated data and bad data collection.

SEMrush Position tracking is showing a lot of false flux lately for a couple of reasons.

1)  They don't identify your position in the SERPs and report it as "not in top 100".  If you click to see the cache that they used to obtain the rankings your domain is there.

2)  Google has been inserting and removing a link to the image results at the top of many SERPs.   "Images for [your query]"   When present, SEMrush is counting this link to the image results as position #1 and the result is all results below are pushed down one position.  When not present, all of the results below move up one position.  You don't notice this very much in your visibility score if you are on the second page.  However, if you have keywords that rank in the top three or four it can make a huge change in your visibility score.

3)  Google does seem to be experimenting a bit and even losing track of a few pages for the keywords that they typically rank for.   So, yes there is a little more flux in Google, but the number changes in many of the tools are a result of contaminated data and bad data collection.

We have found that visitors who arrive at our site through search are over 10x more valuable than visitors who arrive from social media.   So, if we have content, we post it on our site, optimize it to pull traffic from search, and promote it to all of our visitors by posting links to it in many relevant locations.

Getting a shout out through social media might produce a one-time spike in traffic when the content is new, but an article on the website will pull traffic from search for years and years.  That  traffic from search will be more valuable.

By keeping all of your content resources on your own site, will enable your content library to grow faster and larger.  And, if you have done a good job on that content your visitors will see it and share it on social media for you.  Again, this is not a one-time blast, but a slower but steadier stream of sharing that will last for years and years.

Also, when you share your content through influencers, they will become your competitors in search, they can use it to drive affiliate salesl  And, there will be a lot of opportunists watching the influencer, and some of them will grab your content, mash it up, rewrite it, and you will have instant competitors for your valuable ideas in search and linking to Amazon.

The approach described above has the best opportunity of working if you can produce highese quality content.  If you can't do that, then it doesn't matter what approach you decide to use.

I would create best-on-the-web content and place it on my own site.

I think that this is usually fine.

My only concern would be that common page.  I would put enough work into it to make sure that it does not have same structure, same code, same anything.  Just to be safe.

Thanks for your thoughtful response.  As you point out, there are many different business models, and what might be best "general" practice, might not quite fit every model.

Moz Q&A is great for this type of discussion.

I think that it makes better sense for the reader and better sense for you, to put all of this stuff on the original blog.

The backlinks that any second blog will create will be worthless unless you have links into the second blog from third party websites.  So, instead of building that second blog, just put all of that great content on the main blog and get the backlinks straight to the the site you are promoting.

Building a second blog just for backlinks is like trying to kill a rabbit with a ricochet.   Just shoot the damn rabbit.

I don't think that Google is going to like this second blog very well if you are making it to manufacture backlinks for your first blog.  Google was killing that stuff twenty years ago.

I would make extremely detailed MODEL pages.  They would be enormous in size, telling all of the benefits about each model.  I would also have enormous brand pages, summarizing each model and including comparisons that help the customer select the right one.  For the brand you can also have detailed maintenance pages, pages about safety, and much more.

People who purchase this type of product want a lot of information.  Your website can be the "go to place" for every model and the entire brand.  I would make it better than the manufacturer's website.

This client is already selling these bikes.  He should know all of the questions that people ask before they buy, all of the questions that they have after the purchase and all of the questions that they don't ask but should be askin'.   I'd put a lot of work into this if I was your client, especially if nobody has done anything like this before.  Then I would release it an promote it like mad.

I do have duplucate content (products) on my new platform and I wonder if putting all the links of those products on Canonical could benefit the original specialized websites.

Google has not said exactly how they treat these.

I believe that rel=canonical has become a substitute for the old method of building links by article syndication.  I believe that many people are doing it at industrial scale and that google will eventually start to discount the beneifits, ignore the benefits or penalize some uses of rel=canonical.

For that reason I am staying away from rel=canonical just like I stay away from dropping links in forums, buying links, linkwheels, syndicating articles, etc.  That's me being cautions and taking care of my websites.

Each person must decide what they are willing to do.  You can wait until Google publishes it in their webmaster guidelines or you can stop doing something that Google might simply refer to as "manipulation" without getting specific about it.  Google is specific about very few things.

Here are a few things that many people do not understand.

1. The date of posting does not indicate who owns the content.

2. The date that Google finds the content does not indicate who posted it first or who owns it.

3. Ownership is independent of date of posting and date of Google discovery.

4. Google does not always grant best rankings to "who they discovered first".  The rankings often go to "who is the most powerful".

5. If you file a DMCA against someone who has documented permision to post the content and they decide to sue you for having that content taken down, you are probably going to lose, and you might have to pay more than you expect in damages and more than you expect in attorney fees.

6. The good news is that legal advice on copyright often costs a lot less than you expect and a Hell of a lot less than getting sued.   Know what you are doing and the potential consequences before filing DMCA.

7. There are two ways to get the canonical applied.  A) the webmaster of the website that is publishing the content must insert a canonical tag into the of the html of the page.  It should read like this...    B) the webmaster of the website that is publishing the content can apply rel=canonical using .htaccess.

Let's say we have two domains.  The "source domain" where the article first appeared and the "republisher domain" where the article has been posted with rel=canonical pointing back to the "source domain".

If you use a cross-domain canonical the copy of the article on the source domain will remain in the Google index.  The article on the republisher domain will not be indexed.   Also, any page that links to the page of the republished article will appear in the Search Console backlinks of the source article page.

The above is information that you can verify as fact through testing.

What can not be verified is how Google counts the juice from all of those links that show up in your Search Console.

My personal opinion is that Google faithfully counted the linkjuice when rel=canonical was first suggested "by Google" for attributing the source of republished articles.

However, I currently doubt that the linkjuice from cross-domain canonicals still carries the same value.  And, because some people have been using cross-domain rel=canonical at industrial scale, I am starting to believe that manipulative use of rel=canonical can result in the same problems that you would incur from building unnatural links.

I am not doing anything at industrial scale, but because of the above I am not going to use cross-domain rel=canonical in the future and have taken down some republished pages that have been in place for  a couple of years.

Everyone has their opinions about these things.  I am not going to give an opinion, I'll simply say what I do.

1. you have a slightly irrelevant article to your website topic, low conversions, but a lot of quality links to page, but no primary keywords in article title.

I prefer to have mostly content on a site that is closely related to the central theme of the site, but I don't mind having slightly, or moderately, or highly unrelated content on my sites - especially if it attracts visitors - and if it attracts visitors I don't mind having quite a bit of that content on the site.  I monetize it with ads and if it attracts links I enjoy the linkjuice.   I know for a fact that some of these visitors buy stuff, and know for a fact that they go onto other pages of the site that are in the central theme.

Bottom line... I would keep the article that you describe.  I might improve it if I can so it will attract more links and more traffic.  I would slap a couple of Adsense units on it and block my competitors ads from appearing.

2. You have a slightly irrelevant article to your website, low conversion, but a lot of quality links AND you have your site's primary keywords in article title

This is kickass.  Make more of these if you can.

3. You have a relevant topic to the site, but low engagement and low conversions.

Sometimes articles like this are extremely valuable for visitors and past customers.  If it is a page that says how to repair an item that you sell then it is valuable, if it is low effort to produce make more of them.  These articles can attract links.

There are many ways that slightly irrelevant articles can be valuable.  I have totally irrelevant articles that attract a lot of traffic, make a lot of ad money and produce a few conversions.  Low engagement, low conversions but huge links and huge ad revenue.  I am always looking for these opportunities.

For your pages, do you focus pages with similar products on one/a few similar keywords?

Yes.  As an example, lets say we sell "coffee makers".  We will have a generic coffee maker page that lists many different coffee makers from various manufacturers.   When a shopper clicks on one of the coffee maker models, they go to a page that sells the coffee maker, its accessories and its cleaning products.  All of these are unique content with very little reuse of the accessory language on other pages.

Do you add written content directly to these pages or focus on creating good user guides etc then link back to these product pages?

We include the most important "user guide" information on the product/accessory page.  This is information that helps select the item.  We don't list the full user guide information, but give the shopper a link to a much more detailed page of user information.  Both of these compete in search and often they appear in positions #1 and #2 in Google search.  The product/accessory page might link to several "user guide pages".   Sometimes we have positions #1, #2 and #3 in Google for searches on the product itself or product information.

The above is very costly to produce and it requires an author who really knows the product.  It is only worth doing where there is good money to be made on a single sale and recurring consumable/accessory/parts/etc. sales are possible.

This type of presentation is intended to make you the expert in the field, rank #1 and inspire people to pay you full MSRP because they know that you know what you are doing rather than being a buy/resell merchant.

**Do you try to push product or category pages? **

Neither.

Most of our pages sell multiple products.   We have very few "product pages" where one item is purchased.  90% of our sales come from pages that list closely-related groups of products.

Examples...

*  A product and its accessories.

*  A group of consumables for a hobby or craft activity.

*  Multiple closely-related products that people often consider before buying.

*  Multiple books about a single or group of closely-related topics.

Why?  There are many benefits.

*  Reduces the number of pages on the site, thus concentrating linkstrength into a small number of pages.

*  Enables the production of pages with substantial amounts of text, images, buying options.  We think these rank better.

*  When a product goes unavailable or out-of-print or is discontinued, the page continues on.

*  When accessories are listed on same page with product it leads to fatter shopping carts.

• When replacement parts are listed on the same page as the product then people feel confident in buying.

*  People become familiar with the page about their product and return again and again for consumables, parts, accessories.

I agree.  We have thousands of products.   But, most of our effort has focused on products that....

*  People understand poorly

*  Where there is not a lot of information available online or in print

*  Where (this is extremely important) a lot of consumables are purchased.  That way all of your building is for customers who make recurrent purchases.

We get content ideas from customers.  What questions do they ask about products?   What concerns do they have about products?  What do they say in their reviews of our business and products?  What do we feel that they need to know that they don't realize?

A lot of the above comes in to us through email and phone calls.  Some we see in reviews that they leave.  If you have these channels of communication or feedback from customers, a lot of the most valuable content is right there.  All you have to do is package it in text and photos and put it on the website.

So far we have not done much ourselves on social.  Our customers do a lot of sharing for us.  And, we have a couple friends who have nice followings.  They share new content from our site and that brings in a lot of traffic.  So go look for who is influential in your niche and see if you might help them get your word out.

My gauge for this is to visit the SERPs and see WHO is ranking on the first page.   The number competing and the volume matters a lot less than who is competing and what type of content has earned them these rankings.  If I think that I can compete with their content then I attack - it does not matter the number competing or any other metric - if you have a good site and can defeat their content then you can probably attract enough links to become competitive over time.

I think about it like this... Do not fear competition, because where there is competition there is probably also a lot of traffic and a lot of money changing hands.  You can often make decent money from long tail keywords on the edges of the fight and if you can break onto the first page of the SERPs there is likely a good payday.

If these sites all have unique, substantive content and are not incestuously interlinking, then it is fine to host them on the same dedicated server.

Then you should make them all day.

I wouldn't spend anything on external landing pages.  I'd put everything I got into the main site.

What are external landing pages?

If the old domain is strong, the new domain will start getting some stable traffic in about a week.  Two at most.

That is if the new domain has all of the same on-page optimization of the old page, but if that digital agency took shortcuts - such as duplicate title and description tags across the site, or made mistakes such as a bad htaccess... they it will take forever unless they are fixed.

We have lots of content on our retail sites.

Some is content that helps visitors use/select/maintain/repair/enjoy the products that we sell.   These pages link to where the product can be purchased, where to purchase parts, where to purchase accessories, etc.   These pages bring in more traffic than our sales pages and people who arrive at the site through these pages account for a significant number of conversions.

Some is content that is related to the niche that we sell but unrelated to the products that we sell.  These pages also bring in more traffic than our sales pages and account for a significant amount of conversions.

On all pages of our site, articles, sales, category, home, etc.... we run adsense, but block the ads of our direct competitors.  These ads bring in nice money.  Do we lose a few potential buyers through these ads?  Yes, but we don't have to do any work for the income.

Thanks!

I understand your comment about "knowing it when you see it". 

I am not looking for work.  We are way to busy here working on our own sites and have not done work for others in over a decade.

If the object were to wring the most ROI out of the second site, would you:

I can't say what I would do without a deep deep understanding of the site.  I wrestle with these questions about pairs of sites that I have owned for ten years.  A good decision has to consider many things, some of which are... A) content overlap, B) revenue source overlap, C) staff and financial resources available to work on another site, D) staff and financial resources required to improve the other site compared to the financial benefits expected, E) how close the competition is to kicking my primary site's ass, F) how close my primary site is to kicking competition's ass, G) how the profitability and fun elements of this job compare to the MANY others that are currently on backburners at my office, H) and, most important, how much mental energy I have for the fight.

A) Make the second site not much more than a link slave to the first, going through the trouble to keep everything separate, including owner, hosting, G/A, log-on IPs, so as not to devalue the links to 1st site, etc?

I would never take this choice.   Just redirect the site instead of doing something that you think you gotta hide.  This choice assumes that Google is a dumbass.  They ain't.

B) Develop the second site and not worry about hiding that both are the same owner.

I have one domain that is a large site and competes with two smaller sites that I also own.  The smaller sites have a niche specialty, so only a tiny fraction of the large site competes with them.  All of these sites have the same whois, they are all in my webmaster console, they all have the same authorship style and are hosted at the same company in the same building.  They all have absolutely unique content, very different, even if same subject.  There are also some links between the sites, not a lot, no money anchor text, and the links are disclosed as being affiliated or both sites owned by same company.  If you do all of the above, I don't think that you need to worry about Google getting angry about it. These sites have been doing this for ten years.

C) Develop the second site and  still worry about it keeping it all hidden from Google.

I think that Google knows a lot about who owns websites.  I might have private whois if I don't want people getting in touch, but I would not worry about Google knowing that same company owns them as long as you are not doing anything sneaky.

D) Buy the second site and forward the whole thing to site 1.

This is white hat in my opinion, but if both sites have similar link profiles at the domain level then you might not gain much from this method.  Careful study is needed to decide if this is better than option B.   How much work is needed to get the second site up to your standards and improve it to a point that it will become more competitive.

My pet peeve is folks who slam a fast/insufficient answer into an unanswered question, just to be the first. So, please don't.

How do you know their intent?   Fast answers might not have that intent.  Maybe my answer is Insufficient because  I didn't give an answer that will satisfy a lot of people.  Why?  I didn't give an absolute answer because there isn't one without a really detailed study that I don't have time or any intentions to give.   My pet peeve is when people want a $2000 answer for free in a forum and think that a $200 answer is crap because it didn't give an absolute answer.

I think that you either say "thanks" or nothing to anyone who gives you their time. An absolute answer to your question would require a content audit, a link audit, and a lot of information about your company and the industry just to get started.  I think that it is a five digit question in many situations.  And, you could pay five digits to two different people and get two very different answers.  In that situation, you would need to decide who to believe.  How are you going to do that?.

I am not providing a insufficient answer here because I am looking for paid work.  I simply give two cent answers to people who might appreciate them.  I took a chance on you.

I imagine that eventually he will be caught, right?

He might get whacked - especially if the sites have verbatim text on every page.  He might get away with it for a long long time if each site has totally unique text and he isn't interlinking these sites very heavily or interlinking them with nofollow.  Lots of people are able to link between their own properties if they are using the biz name as the anchor text instead of a money keyword.  (I know that this answer wasn't satisfying, but that's my opinion on how diverse are the ways that Google handles these things.

I mean, this has to be Black Hat SEO.

Ignorant bliss has a large overlap with black hat in appearance, although the intent is very different.  It's blackhat if these sites are identical except for the name of the community and the seller of the service knows that this is far below best practice.... and even worse if they are being juiced from a private blog network or paid links from ignorant webmasters or from those who know paid links are not good but sell anyway.

Have any of you encountered an SEO/Marketer like this?

This stuff is everywhere. Sometimes they grab your content and use it in New Jersey.

If so, what do you do about it?

Beat their asses with quality.

Agreed, and sometimes there can be power in a one word title - both for optimization and communication.

"really just didn't need to be any longer than 160ish characters"

Thanks!

That's a very interesting thought.  Especially if you can do effective "short and punchy" descriptions.  If you ramble too long it stinks it up. 

Seeing that you use the words... "our Wikipedia page"... makes me think that you might have created the page yourself.

If this is a Wikipedia page or a link that you created yourself, it is possible that someone at Wikipedia deleted it.  They don't like self-created articles or self-created links.

Just sayin...

Google uses a lot of factors to determine which page or pages of a website will rank for a specific keyword.   To make a very simple example, which is probably realistic in most situations, we can attribute the ranking of a webpage for Keyword X mainly to two factors:   the strength of the page, and the optimization of the page for the specific keyword.

Let's assume that Google uses (strength * optimization).

By that, a weak page with perfect optimization, could be outranked by a strong page with weak optimization.   This is probably what you are seeing on your site right now.

Most sites have homepages that are stronger than interior pages, so seeing the homepage outrank an interior page is not uncommon.  It is expected to happen a lot.  When it happens for you, it means that your interior page doesn't have the strength to compete, and in that situation you should give thanks that your homepage is ranking because otherwise your interior page would be buried.

You should give thanks for another reason.  When your interior page gets strong enough to rank on the first page, you will probably have a double listing (two pages on the first page of the SERPs for that query).

If you want to change this outcome, the best work to do is to get more internal and external links into your interior page to improve its strength.

A few years ago, Google wanted authors to create a profile page and share their content on Google+.  Then we were to "register" our authorship with a rel=author link to our Google+ profile.

Even though Google abandoned "authorship"... today, perhaps we should be using Google+ in a similar way to communicate our E-A-T (experience, authority and trustworthyness)?

Nice work, Roman.

What a generous and informative reply.

"It's not considered duplicate or thin content because you're giving an attribution link back to the original content."

Giving attribution links does not change the fact that they are duplicate and  thin content.  Why should Google index them?  They do not provide anything new to the web.  Google will either send these pages to the supplemental index or not index them at all.  If they are indexed they will eventually fall out of the index.

"Do you mean to get link value I need to have more authority backlinks to my blogspot or external links to other authority sites?"

Yes, but if you can get unique and valuable links, you will be better off getting them pointing straight at your main domain.

Yep, they are not patient.

They need to consider that they are arriving at the battle 5, 10, 15 or 20 years late.  Existing websites have been working all of that time and Google will not push them aside in favor of a noob who has invested very little in comparison.

If they want to see results they need to invest enough to become competitive.   It's no different than me deciding that I am going to challenge Anthony Joshua and expect to step into the ring with him after three months of work.

I visited a few of the post pages on the blogspot site.  These pages appear to be simply the first few sentences from the medicarefaq.com website.   I don't think that Google will like these pages because they are:  A) signposts for medicarefaq.com, B) duplicate content of medicarefaq.com, and C) thin content.

For the blogspot site to be an asset, the content needs to be unique and substantive.  And, the blogspot site will not pass any linkvalue to medicarefaq.com unless it has unique links into it from websites that are outside of your own network and not duplicates of websites that already link to medicarefaq.com.

If these were my websites, I would put all of my time into medicarefaq.com and stop working on sites that merely link to it.

If all it takes is for you to "submit an article" to get something published then those sites are going to fill up with crap in a hurry.  After they fill up with crap their links will become poison and you will have an unnatural links problem.

We have sites with a lot of content and people are constantly writing to "get an article published".  At first we received so much absolute crap that a lot of time was wasted.  It didn't slow down until we started requiring an resume that clearly shows significant education and/or experience related to the submitted content, links to previously published content, and a face slapping bullet point that we don't accept  linkbuilder content.

Now we don't get a lot of content offers but what is offered is mostly from educated and experienced people who simply want to get a message out and obtaining a link to their website is not a consideration.   Still a few linkbuilder types will try to fake or argue or weasel their way in.   These are much easier to reject than the ones that we get from certified crackpots who submit high quality authorship that is too far on the fringe of our topics. 

What discernible differences will there be between ads and organic content?

I believe that your traffic sources will determine how this hits you.  If all of the ISPs give all subscribers access to Google then I don't think my traffic will suffer very much - because Google is where most of my traffic comes from.

However, if most of your traffic comes through direct visits, then you will need to think hard about how to continue attracting a steady flow of new fans - if they are not coming from Google.  Then you will need to resort to an accelerated and exposure targeted ad spend.

A very new type of ad will probably develop.  That will be ads that appear between the websites that you visit much like the commercials that you now see between the programs that you watch on television.  The ISPs might also slap their own ads between your pageviews.   This could upset the balance between ads as a traffic source and organic search.

The ISPs might all place a bar across the bottom of the screen.  This will offer you search, weather, shopping, reference, and utilities - all pointing at sites who pay or share revenue for this exposure.  Advertising gets clicked up another notch.

One thing that I didn't address is my plans...

Right now, I see the cost of all of the labor that was put into my website plus its future income stream at risk.  If ISPs start charging us, or throttling us, or selling access to our content then a huge transfer of wealth and value is going to occur.

I was thinking, even at my old age, of starting a new project.  But, I am not so excited about that now that such unpredictable and potentially damaging changes might occur.

Yep.  We watched that WBF it at my office when it was new.  It was good to be reminded of it again.  I watched it a second time.  Thanks!

I look at cable and satellite television as a comparison.

The companies who provide households and businesses access to the content are similar to the ISPs of the internet space.  In fact, some of them are the same companies who provide connection to satellite and cable.

They make money by selling me a bundle of channels.  I can pay a small fee for basic channels, I can pay a larger fee for nicer selection of channels, or I can pay big bucks for a deluxe package.

Right now, anybody who "has internet" can view your website.  But, if the companies who provide web access are allowed to "bundle internet" how many people will still have access to your website?   Will the basic subscriber?  Or, will your site only be viewable by the people who pay for the deluxe access.

It might be possible that you will have to pay for your site to be included in basic.  It might be that any household who wants to view your site will have to pay for premium.  Maybe you will either have to pay to get your content out to everyone or maybe your content will be so grand that the ISP will charge customers for the deluxe package to see your website.

ISPs might make money from your content one way or the other.  Homes and businesses might no longer get access to everything, they might only have access to websites who pay to be seen or websites that ISP might decide to sell access to.

I thought that Ajit Pai's behavior was not professional.  It was smirking, mocking, condescending.  Not the behavior of a person who I would assume to be telling the truth and who I would assume studied to know the full potential impact of his actions.

I would improve the main domain.  Building a subdomain will divide your power.

We redirected all of our subdomains into folders a few years ago and the results have been kickass.

If you attack with a collection of microsites, you lose the domain authority of a large website with overwhelming linkstrength.  It is like attacking a battleship with a fleet of rowboats - none of them have enough strength to do much damage.

Also, there is a marketing advantage of the large diverse site.  Cross-selling.  Some plastic surgery patients might need dermatology services and they will see from the website that the single business offers both.

The large website will pull in more links, more domain searches, more brand mentions, and more of many other things that will build brand recognition and search engine strength.

This topic requires books to explain.  But with limited time at this season of the year, here is a quick stab....

Do not fear having a website with multiple topics.  The strength of one topic can actually help power the rankings of all other topics as it builds domain authority.

Google has a patents on assessing a "body of work" which might be a folder on your website egol.com/dentistry/ or a subdomain on a website dentristry.egol.com.

Current SEO best practice is to prefer folders over subdomains because google currently seems to treat subdomains more like separate websites rather than a portion of a large website.

So, don't hesitate to build the multi-topic website but separate them clearly in to /folders/.

Always keep in mind that one folder full of /crap/ can damage the rankings of the entire website.

To start, we are rewriting the descriptions for a few dozen pages.

**Which pages? ** Those that have really deep content that pulls in a lot of traffic for long tail keywords of value.

What's the intended result?   If we get those frequently-searched keywords into the description they will show in bold text in the SERPs.

**What are the strategies ? **

A) Use those keywords in ways that show we have deeper information for those who click into the site.

B) Associate those keywords with value propositions, urgency, mystery and other triggers to action.

Get a big white board on the wall of your office.  Along the left side draw a vertical line and label it "PROFITABLE"...   along the bottom draw a horizontal line and label it "LINKABLE".  These are the Axes of Success.

Now plot your projects on this graph at positions along these axes.  Then organize your work to do as many jobs in the upper right quadrant as possible.

I would not delete.  I would not redirect.  I would publish the improved post on the original URL.

Don't disrupt your assets.

We are always improving our content.  Doing a major rewrite of a couple articles per week now and will not finish for a couple years.  All of this stays on the same URL.

I believe that if these links are "nofollow" that changing them will have no direct impact on your status with Google or your rankings.

Deleting them will make forum members who don't understand "nofollow" really angry with you.

They might also decide not to spam your site, which will be good for your forum in many ways.    You might also lose some nonspammers who don't understand and leave.

Good luck.

The something that "happened" might have been a Google algo change.  Or it could have been Google giving one of your competitors a promotion.  If a website has made significant improvment, many pages on the site could be promoted at the same time.

If you want to know when "something happens" in Google check here.

https://www.mariehaynes.com/algo-changes-and-more/