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I know several developers but the main concern is the platform, Big Commerce. I am not offering feedback regarding the platform, but the first decision you need to make is whether you are committed to sticking with Big Commerce. If you wish to keep the site built on Big Commerce, my recommendation would be to seek out a developer who specifically has experience working with that platform. There are tons of developers and companies who are all to willing to accept any web development work. You want a specialist who can say "I have built dozens of Big Commerce sites, that's mainly what I do."

Thanks for you answer i'm going to talk to the hosting company!

OK I have read that they don't like refresh, but what other ways are there to do it?  I am not a coder and our developer doesn't know how to do it.

Yep, I would go with a 301 also. Keep that juice (or as much as you can muster).. you'll lose a little value in the transfer.. (5-15%), but it would be worth keeping it. Cheers!

Note: You should make sure all the canonical versions of this render properly as well. This way - all links and 'juice' or value are passed the the domain name you specify. www.mysite.com mysite.com mysite.com/default.aspx www.mysite.com/defaults.aspx Checking Google webmaster tools will also help see any errors when handling duplicate content issues (for homepage or entire site). as this was also a new feature in recent months added by Google. Cheers!

Thanks guys! So my interpretation of your feedback and the short answer to my questions are: 1. Yes, it's worth doing. 2. Yes, it's worth doing. Cheers!

Have you considered wordpress.com? You can import your entire existing Wordpress blog pretty painlessly and then it costs $12/yr to point your domain to it (so you would retain all your URL structures). The only downsides are it can be tricky to get your users all mapped (provided you have more than 1) and you can't keep any custom templates. But it's pretty fast and very reliable, plus you would never have to upgrade your site.

Doug Roberts: Thanks for the help. I will definitely try and explore how the search results appear in search engines. I think optimizing the description further may help. Having a look at other results will help too I am sure. Alan Mosley: Thanks for your comments.   I cannot share the URL of the website as my client may not like it, but I will definitely absorb your comments and work on them.

Hey! I Cant believe that nobody has answered this... Yes I would say that any site with a mobile version should have a seperate sitemap for it, it does count and Google likes it as it makes it easier to crawl and index for them. Just make sure that: Your mobile sitemap ONLY contains URLs that serve mobile content (otherwise they get ignored). Make sure all URLs have the  mobile:mobiletag.</mobile:mobile> Have fun! Dan

They offer II7 but I didn't see any point to it... Now it's dawning on me I may need to reconsider. 

Same result, article sites are not lied by goolge, I doubt they get anty special treatment.

Normally I'd say a 301 redirect but that's when the page has moved for good. You want domain.com to become domain.com/blog and then domain.com becomes something else. Since you're keeping the old URL I would suggest moving the page and linking to the new blog home page. Google will see domain.com/blog as a new page this way and, as long as you have new content on your main page, it's not likely to cause any issues since bots will have to spider domain.com to find domain.com/blog

Do you know if it's actually ranking? If it is, make sure that your sitemap has the proper header which identifies it as an xml sitemap. You obviously want Google to crawl it, but if you don't have the proper header, it will treat it like any other page and you might rank for it. You can also put a "noindex, follow" directive on your sitemap, which will crawl it, but not index it as a SERP.

Page and site load speed/time is a factor as Matt has said in the past. It's beginning to take more effective value in the 'user experience' which Google is trumpeting in past months. I would surely aim to analyze and look over the data you need to see the value in taking the time to start correcting issues with regards to your site speed and load times. Yslow is a great tool for sure, but you can also download a chrome AP called 'SEO Site Tools', which has some great features to determine things like this. I would also look to incorporate Gzip into your site for compression. You might also want to look at the file size of the homepage. If it exceeds 30kb, it's probably too large, and taking more time than needed to call the HTTP requests for various CSS, JS scripts, images, etc.. Just some more things too look at Cheers.

Thank you Rob for taking the time to answer. Much appreciated. That's pretty much the direction we started with. I kind of look at it like an internal search. When an internal search is made for a product that doesn't exist, they get returned to a 200 and static item not found page. So we are moving forward this same method. Our next step is to reduce 8k 404s a week we get!

With directories it's all about getting links and anchor text. Will links harm a site? Never, if they have some quality. If you like the quality of directories i think you should go for it.