Strategy for two related sites where wrong site is dominating

[nmottet]

Our company has had 2 websites (our primary "company.com" and a secondary "product.com"), both about the same industry, although they both had disctinct content and targeted 2 types of keywords: one targeted "keyword A keyword B" and the other "keyword A keyword C".

We had success for about 4-8 years and enjoyed good rankings. About 6 months ago however, the smaller website (product.com), actually started ranking better for all keywords, and our primary company website (company.com) dropped a few positions, from #1-2 to #5-8. Often, both sites showed at the same time in the top 10 results.

2 days ago, our primary company website (company.com) has entirely dropped from SERPS for all our popular keyword searches, even though it has an 8-year history of very good rankings. It doesn't even show up for a search for our company name (our other smaller site, product.com does!).

A search for site:www.company.com shows all our pages, except for the homepage.

It seems that Google has identified our smaller site (product.com) as the "dominating" site and has assigned a penalty to our primary company website (company.com).

What do you suggest I do to change that?

I would be ready to abandon the 2-site strategy (leftovers from old SEO times), but would like to focus on company.com.

Should I implement a 301 redirection from product.com to company.com or do I risk loosing all listings because of a redirection to a "penalized" website? (having at least 1 of the sites listed is critical...).

Thanks in advance,

[jimbeetle]

It seems that Google has identified our smaller site (product.com) as the "dominating" site and has assigned a penalty to our primary company website (company.com).

I wouldn't take any such major steps on an "It seems that..." supposition, you might wind up shooting yourself in the foot and lose everything. Until you know exactly what's what, stand pat.

I'd suggest complete audits of both sites trying to pinpoint anything that might have changed over the past six or so months. Did the backlink profiles stay the same or similar (presuming some growth)? Are they (still) healthy? Was the increase/decrease across the board for all search terms or have some been affected more than others? Any possibility of G's -30 or -950 penalties? Plus, throw in all the usual on-page stuff and actual traffic and referrer patterns.

Then look at your competition (besides yourselves, that is). Has anything changed in the space? Has there been any churn in the SERPs among your competitors? Have other players come in that have displaced that domain?

In short, don't change anything without first being pretty danged sure you know what the problem is.

[nmottet]

I've queried a lot of keywords and the homepage does not show up in the first few pages of SERPS at all, for any keyword (Not G's -950 since this penalty affects only a few specific keywords.)

Some subpages do still show up for very specific keyword queries (our homepage used to receive the best rankings though, by far).

This leads me to think that only the homepage is penalized. When I look for "company name", our company.com website doesn't show up in the first 10 pages of results (which means it's probably not G's -30).

To answer your other questions:

The competitive landscape has almost not changed at all.
We redesigned our website on January 1st (80 days ago) and this didn't seem to affect rankings. Until a few days ago. We may have over optimized some pages with an excessive use of the same keywords in headlines, but there was nothing schocking (a professional copywriter with little to no experience of SEO wrote the copy).

[nmottet]

I've done more investigation and I'm starting to think our company.com homepage was banned because of the sites described below.

After the redesign on Jan 1st, a link was accidentaly placed on 1 page to our old website, stored at www2.company.com. Google did index pages from this www2 site and this may have created confusion. (The copy on the new www.company.com website was completely updated though, so it wasn't literally duplicate content.)

Two years ago, we also signed a licensing agreement with a firm to product the same product under a different name (www.newcompanyname.com and www.newcompanyname-2ndVersion.com). The use of product.com, company.com, newcompanyname.com and newcompanyname-2ndVersion.com may also be the reason for the penalty or ban of company.com. Google may have penalized us for having too may sites in the same industry?

product.com and the newcompanyname.com websites are still ranking (although no SEO effort was started for newcompanyname.com). Company.com's homepage is nowhere to be found.

All sites are hosted the same location but under a different IP address.