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Thanks Dana, You've already got me thinking. I'm wondering if an totally different approach here might be creating a blog post or similar along the line of Ten Funny Facts about The Quaich - or maybe - 5 Things You Didnt Know About The Scottish Quaich. You've got me thinking already. I'll amend that title shortly too Thanks for the tips. BTW - The client sells hundred of quaichs to the UK and America - if I can crack this keyword they should become more commonly known Oh and (it took me a while to get it) it's pronounced kwake (like awake but with a k at the start instead of an a)

Hi Timothy,  You can pm me and I'll take a look for you.  Do you know when your traffic started to drop?  Have you done much link building? Hired an SEO at all?

Hi Wayne, Thanks for the follow up. Unfortunately, I can't get into webmaster tools for the old domain. It says: "Verify your ownership of http://patioenc.com" Gar. **I guess I'll just ask. Thanks!**

Thanks for your help Casey! The situation is this. There are 2 domains using the same exact ciontent on every page. But one site is NOT using the same IP. Its using an iframe to put the whole website within it. But  basically both sites are using same exact content but have totallydifferent IP. This is a No No correct? I need to make both of them to point to  same IP? thanks

I'm not exactly sure what you are asking, but I will try to answer. Google is constantly crawling and updating the pages in their index and SERPs. You can make as many or as few changes to your webpage and Google will eventually crawl the page and update the SERPs with your updated page. An easy way to test to see if Google has updated your page is to search Google with the query "site:www.yoursite.com" and you will see all the pages from your website that Google has in its index. If the Google result for a particular page is not showing up with your changes, hang in there, it just means Google has not crawled that page yet but will do so eventually. You can also check the Google cache of a particular page to see the last time Google accessed it and see the content of the page that Google currently has in its index.

That would indeed fix the issue. Although i'd check your internal pages as well to make sure the plugin that is implementing the canonical tag on line 9 is doing it properly sitewide

This is what are the differences between dynamic and static URLs (by Google): http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls.html  In short it's that static URL have a slight advantage in terms of clickthrough rates because users can easily read the urls, but the decision to use database-driven websites does not imply a significant disadvantage in terms of indexing and ranking. Anyway the URL is static or dynamic you should keep them in one place, because redirecting a URL to another loses up to 10% value. You can read more here: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection Hope this helps.

thanks moosa! actually i did not mention that the first thing we did was implement a 301 redirect from the root to the sub. this resulted in content in our e commerce store to immediately achieve decent rankings in the SERPS. now I am working on getting the backlinks pointing to the root domain to point to our new subdomain. do you think, that because of the 301 redirect, and possibly due to the use of a decent ecommerce platform, we were able to achieve rankings for keywords so quickly in the subdomain? thanks!

You may get some movement in serps from this, it seems that some believe 301's are just as good as passing ranking value, but others believe you only get about 80-90% percent of the original value. Either way, it shouldn't be a huge difference. All the best.

Maybe they will eventually fix the algo... who knows?!

I'm pretty sure it's a 301 redirect Just to add -- they must have used ikea.ca at some point because opensiteexplorer is showing that they have 6,135 links and some social signals pointing to that .ca domain. Does the fact that is has so many links to the .ca help it rank? even though the value of those links are being passed over to the .com site?

Thanks Alan will get on with that ASAP. Thanks for your help and interest. Peter

Just one adjustment to this - although I think David's right that the canonical tag can be a good solution. Although Google can index https: fine, the issue is whether you're creating duplicates. If you have duplicates, then it's possible that the https: version could be the one you want as canonical. In this case, it doesn't sound like it, but I just wanted to point that out. Of course, long-term, you should sort out why these are being created. A desktop crawler like Xenu or Screaming Frog may be the best bet, but I'd hit the WordPress forums, too. Odds are it's a common issue. Typically, it happens when some deeper page (like a shopping cart) on a site is secure, and then the links are all relative ("/about.php", for example). Then, those links get crawled as both secure and non-secure. Unfortunately, I'm not a WordPress expert, so I can only speak in generalities.

wait, when you say this do you mean broken links on your site or links on other sites pointing to pages on your site that no longer exist? "Since then, we have taken very careful steps to remove all links coming into these deleted pages, but for some reason, WMT continues to report them.  " If internal links then by all means fix broken links on your site. If external links pointing go your site, don't have those sites remove your links - just 301 that old url that they are pointing to (if there is PR to be gained) and point them to the closest similar page or section. If it's only a link here or ther then let them 404. 404ing is a natural occurance and Google has no problem with it.

Thanks for the fast response Streamline Metrics. We have to used the Hosting site's Cpanel Parked Domain module to redirect to the correct domain. Is this safe to do? Will google consider this as safe 301 redirect? thanks

Yes, you do need to redirect. They are actually different URLs. It's like you moved from 123 Fifth Avenue to 123 Fifth Street.

What CMS are you using?  If it is wordpress, there is a plugin that allows you to configure when google is asked to crawl your site and you can set it up so that they only crawl your "archives" monthly and set up how often you have new content on the site.  it is called WP Robots Txt

If the server performance is better and you page speed load times improve then it will help your SEO. Google no longer requires you to have your site hosted in the same country as your target region.

Cross domain canonical is an excellent idea given the fact that you are going to retain the old website. Just go for it.