Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Really really helpful thanks

Like others have said I can't find any links to your site. All three of Opensiteexplorer, ahrefs and Majesticseo show 0 links to http://www.lodgmate.com/. You are being indexed by Google, so that's a start but you need to at least have some sort of link profile to start ranking. You may want to start social profiles even if they have only a couple posts on them, just to get some links pointed at your site. These links are generally of pretty low value but they may help to get you to rank at all. Also I noticed that your homepage has a canonical setup to http://www.lodgmate.com/default.asp which should probably be reversed so that http://www.lodgmate.com/default.asp has a canonical to  http://www.lodgmate.com/. It looks like google is ignoring the canonical anyways, but it's still probably a good idea.

Thanks you guys! That is just what I was looking for!

Google will often choose its own snippet to display in the SERPs, based on the search query the user has typed in. You can have the best meta description in the world, but they may choose to ignore it. Same with title tag.

My thoughts is that the term "Document Scanning" is somewhat ambiguous. When I first read the term you posted my thought was somebody looking for an OCR without knowing what an OCR actually is. It wasn't till I went to your page then read your link The Scanning Process Explained, before I realized what exactly the service was. It appears to be many things in my research, OCR, software, how to, services, hardware ect.. My conclusion would be to purpose a strategy to target multiple longer keywords then one open-ended keyword. I also agree with Samuel, he has some good insights there. (thumbs up!). Don

Matt Cutts has a couple of things to say about news websites. One is that keeping a developing story on one webpage and updating it is a way to have a news page that can build rank. Another is that news websites that are authoritative and/or do their own original writing can do well. Here are the links to the two relevant videos. (Kind of old, I know.) http://youtu.be/9FrzDyRqsY4 http://youtu.be/mtbNpeYP_OM We have news on our website (not at all the major focus - just as a handy reference for users) and it is also valuable to us because Google news picks it up, but since those pages weren't getting traffic after the day the news story appeared, I started removing old ones to be on the safe side. (Though that might not be workable for a site whose main focus is news and needs to keep living archives.)

Thanks for your research Kevin. I saw the same thing. Was looking for work-arounds actually.

I hope you found the answer you were looking for Kate, Good luck! Any chance any of you reading this would take a look and give some advice on my very similar situation? http://moz.com/community/q/site-wide-footer-links-exception-any-advice

Google just stated that SSL does have a (small) beneficial effect on SEO. It's official! Don't expect too much of it, though. It's only one ranking factor out of 200+.

I know lots of people who have two domains in same sector on the same server.   If there content is unique and very different and they are not heavily interlinked then I would be comfortable with that.

Thanks for the suggestion, but I wanted to go with a managed dedicated server that's optimised for Magneto ( So I can concentrate on the website  and not worry about the server being uptodate for PCI etc)

Hi Aggie, Sorry that you're experiencing problems with your migration. My first thought was that you need to make sure you've verified non-www and www for both the old domain and the new one. It sounds like you may have done this? What verification method did you use to verify your old domain? I found a thread in the Google Webmaster forums which mentions using a different verification method (DNS record on both domains) and that seemed to fix the problem. Here is the thread: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/2BC36MTFIm4 Let us know if that helps! Paddy

thanks for your kind advice. I will try to follow up your suggestions~ thanks

Agreed. Besides, maybe someone (a newbie like me!) with the same question could see how I figured it out, then try it on their own. Or someone can see what I did and say "wait, that's not right ... ". I think it comes from my mentality of not to wanting waste people's time on questions I found the answer to - but, yes, we wouldn't want to punish the people putting time into answering, especially when it can help someone else. Thanks for bringing that up, Keri!

I believe you can get some historical rankings data from SEMRush's Guru plan: http://www.semrush.com/prices.html. With that you should be able to piece something together. But if you're just looking to see if specific competitors were ranking for your targeted terms in the last 12 months, the SEMRush Pro package would work. -Trung

Having the same registration, in of itself, will not hurt SEO.  Where you may run into problems is if you are doing blackhat SEO, or doing things against Google's terms of service.  If that happens you could run the risk of your "neighborhood" getting similar punishment/treatment.  If you are doing everything correctly, or mostly correctly, then there should be no problems.

Hi Nick, I do not think you have that bad of a problem if google is showing 23,000 pages even though you have only submitted 1155 pages. How are you getting the 23,000 number? Try using the site operator search for  "site:domain.com" in google (if you have not already) This will show you all of your pages that are indexed. As long as you are working on fixing your errors and making sure you have no dupe content by unsing canonical tags, removing all the page that have thin content OR adding content to pages with little to no content you are going to be in good shape. In regards to your comment about googles webmasters tools. I have a lot of sites in GWMT where I add both www and none www even though I have a 301 redirect with htaccess.  It will not effect you if you add the none www one back (if you deleted it) as that one has data and the one you have just added will not have data in it for a while. Best, Cibble.

Awesome information. Thanks for taking the time to respond. -Richard

Thanks for all the response.  I implemented the switch yesterday, so as of this morning the whole site is for https.  We already had an SSL certificate for our payment area, so luckily it was not a cost issue.  My concern is primarily the slowdown issue as AltecDesigh mentioned (we only have a mid-range server) and any drop in SERP, since essentially from what I have been reading this is like 301'ing to a new domain. Here are the steps I went through.  Not sure if they are the best option, but there were no step by step instructions yet on google so hopefully this will help people who are planning to implement it themselves. 1) Added the SSL certificate (in case people have not done this yet). 2) Implemented a site wide switch through my .htaccess file using this code: RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301] 3) Went through the site, page by page with the Google Chrome developers console open.  That help me find any errors.  The most common ones were including images or external files through their "http" address.  Tedious, but easily fixable by simply doing a Replace All on the files and replacing them with a "https". **4) **Reported the domain change in GWT (which to me seems like an odd thing to have to do) 5) That was it.  It took me one day to implement across our site with about 2000 pages.  If it even helps a bit, that will be a worthwhile use of my time. I also had to add a plugin to our wordpress blog since for some reason the .htaccess changes were not working for our blog in a subfolder.  I will try to come back and update the results in a few weeks so other mozzers can see if this worked for me, or if they should avoid it. Thanks again for all the feedback, it helped us make the decision.  In general I actually like this move of Google (unlike many of the others they have done).  Let's see if it makes any difference.

We have tabbed content that's the same across PDPs on one of our sites. I highly doubt it will hurt you. Cutts has stated that duplicate content isn't a big deal for ecommerce sites.