Is there any correlation to time and search ranking?

[AlanMosley]

No, Rand has stated that its not the time you have been around, but the fact that time brings links and reconition. There maybe advanatge in gaining links and exposure over time steadly, showing a natural pattern, but simply having your domain name registered for a long period i dont think is true.

[casper434]

When competing with sites for SERP that have much lower authority according to OSE, lower page rank, and far fewer, lower authority sites, what other major factor would account for differences other than time?

[AlanMosley]

Relevancy of links, on page SEO and the technical SEO of your site and more, and more we dont know about.
I dont kknow the ins and outs of OSE, but it would be hard to know how relevant the pages where the links come from, somthing very important.

is this your site? http://comoxvalleyrealestate.com/

i will have a look at it for you

[casper434]

No it is not mine. Good point on the relevancy of the pages. Something I had not thought of and will investigate. Thanks for this as I am trying to better understand all of the factors that could affect SERP

[AlanMosley]

Brett, yers i relize that was not your site, i did find your site after making that post, got your image on it.

I did find some problems.

a big one is canonical domin name

Your web site is reachable  by www. and non www, this means that your LJ is split between them. see links for explaination
http://perthseocompany.com.au/seo/reports/violation/the-page-contains-multiple-canonical-formats
http://perthseocompany.com.au/seo/tutorials/how-to-fix-canonical-domain-name-issues

You also have a lot of unopened  or unclosed tags. It is hard for search engines to see what is mean to be visdible to the user, and they may dismiss a lot of content because of this.

There is a few others also, but i would fix these 2, it will probably give you a boost

You have a lot of unnessasary code, .

If you look at souce code of your site, compared to mine, you see a huge difference, i can see your page and mine are about equal on text content showing to the users, but in source code you have 85,146 characters while mine has 11,721

http://perthseocompany.com.au/

[casper434]

Hi Alan, I tried to address this by going to google webmaster tools and establishing the .ca as the preferred domain. I also added a canonical tag to identify the .ca as primary. Not sure if this is enough. My web host says that they do not do 301 redirects and after talking to godaddy.com about how it is set up they suggested leaving as is. I am concerned about google searches but less so with other search engines. As far as code goes I did a  W3C html markup and noticed quite a number of tag issues but they all seemed to be with what I cannot access (part of how the templates are set up by the host) as a user (unless I just do not know how). Any additional thoughts on this would be appreciated

Brett

[AlanMosley]

You have to do a 301 redirect, that important, what web site are we talking about, i was looking at the one under your name .com.

if you dont want to make it public you can personal message it

[casper434]

Private message sent to ThatsIT

[AlanMosley]

if you are with godaddy here are the instructions

http://help.godaddy.com/article/422?locale=en

Forward Only — Specifies the length of time for this forwarding setting. Select one of the following Redirect types:

• I am permanently forwarding my domain — Redirects to       the site you specified in the Forward To field using a "301 Moved       Permanently" HTTP response. The HTTP 301 response code tells user-agents       (including search engines) that the location has permanently moved.

[casper434]

Is it sufficient to redirect  mydomain.ca to www.mydomain.ca or will I also need to redirect mydomain.com to mydomain.ca?

[AlanMosley]

yes all of then to your chosen one.

[casper434]

Godadday does not host my site so if I redirect the mydomain.com to mydomain.ca through them I assume that this will take care of both the sub-domain and root domain between the .com and .ca domains but that I will be effectively removing the .com from my host server. Will this have any negative effect on my .ca? Also since godadday does not host the .ca can I do a 301 from mydomain.ca to www.mydomain.ca through them.

[AlanMosley]

Cant see any think happaning yet
if you are using Ineternet exporer, press F12
select the network tab
and start capture, now when you navigate you can see the response statsu codes

[casper434]

Hi Alan, your last response to my most recent post just lost me. Godaddy does not host my ste

[AlanMosley]

Sorry my mis-understanding, you will need to do somthing about your 301 problem. you need to look into a .htaccess file