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And within Webmaster, add a sitemap and resubmit it. That gives Google an indication that something has changed and they should recrawl. If you already have Webmaster and a sitemap, then just click on the "resubmit" button. They generally get to it within a few days and it's the closest way I know to "force" a crawl.

Thanks for the answer. Really helped

Add the new number 1 as a competitor into your reports and see what they have done better. ..and I agree with the comments before me. Quality of content is King!

I logged into my wmt but nothing, I don't think it's links, since one of my internal pages that has no inbound links got slammed the same way as the homepage targeting the same keyword

I don't recommend doing that, Google can see it as a black hat trick. Black Hat SEOs have been doing 301 from good ranking articles on blogs as well as 301 domains in order to boost their rankings. Are the domains you want to forward to your main site brand new (meaning you bought them the first time, not a domain that you bought after someone else had dropped it)  i ask this because if the domain has been dropped by someone else before you bought it, it could potentially have some links pointing to it that might now be from the most reputable sources and it would be EXTREMELY hard for you to know that you were penalized for a bad link to that domain since all links to the parked domain would show up as one link coming into your main site from the parked domain. read this to get a better idea of what i mean, http://blog.majesticseo.com/training/unnatural-links-investigations/ hope it helps

Look Here - http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1408986 This goes over the exact methods of getting rel=author to work -

Hey There! Sorry about the odd issue. It is hard to say what is going on without an example of two pages we are calling duplicate content. If you could give me to URLs and I will check out this issues. Also the name of the campaign would be great too. If you don't want this in a public forum send me the info to help@seomoz.org.

Couple more questions re this: Would you say its better to name the sub folder in accordance with lang/regional codes i.e. www.example.com/en-us/ or just us/ fine ? Since doesnt really matter and the GWT targeting settings and canonical and href tags added to the us targeted sites pages should be enough ? Also if you set the tags on the us focused subdirectory site and geotarget via GWT etc, should you do similarly on the standard site (a uk hosted .com primarily, but not exclusively, focusing on uk) with uk attributes OR fine to just leave as is (devoid of targeting information) ?

If you are ranking at 2nd/3rd position and sites above you do not have rich snippet it  does makes sense to include them ASAP as it attracts eyeballs and clicks. In short, Rich Snippet definitely help in improving CTR which is a part of ranking signal.

In general you will have to decrease the number of links in your menu. Don't think that a choice of 600 links is really user-friendly. But of course that might be subjective. We have a client with about 300 well-reasoned links on menu and the site performs quite well; most of the pages have great rankings. The SeoMoz crawler still finds it inappropriate but the interaction and the rankings are good. Google are saying that you can have up to a 100 links and that is considered to be normal. Check amazon. They don't have more than 100-ish links on a single page. Think about it and try to cut the bulk from your main navigation if possible. You can always put no-follow links to the subpages and pass seo juice to the main categories and subcategories only. That's the easiest way to solve the task but nothing will change for your users.

I have deal with this situation but at that time Google was kind of nice to low quality links or I should say Google was not as harsh as it is right now! Well the ideal would be to build some quality links and remove low quality links side by side! Keep a balanced between the two activities and this might not hurt much but fluctuation is fairly possible! As far as the redirection is concern, if the DA of the domain is good and some good natural links are point to it than, IMO its great!

Yes i agree with you, SEO is all about matter of time. Almost spent 1 week in learning to promote my website through SEO and still learned the basics even not yet started. Thanks Again Cornel.

As per Google SERP Result's, the maximum length of title tag should be 70 character and Description tag should 150 character, You can use one of best tool called seomofo.com for SERP optimization.

Thank you! Sorry for the late reply. It does help.

Thanks. It doesn't drive a ton of traffic so we may just go ahead and make sure the pages don't get crawled.

I agree with Phil.  The site isn't being redirected to the new one.  Most likely what they setup is a rewrite instead of a redirect. Tell the tech team that the url of the old site should never be visible. And you can use tools like this to verify that it is actually redirecting.  (you should see a 301 redirect) http://tools.seobook.com/server-header-checker/

That's correct.  It is a verified website in my Google Webmaster Tools account. However It doesn't allow me, an Admin, to submit through the Custom Search account.