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Thanks Hilary - I'm concerned that if I do that, I would lose the http version as well.

Google mysteriously decided to index the broken, https version of one page on my company's site (we have a cert for the site, but this page is not designed to be served over https and the CSS doesn't load).

The page already has many incoming links to the http version, and it has a canonical URL with http.  I resubmitted it on http with webmaster tools.  Is there anything else I could do?

I have a Google Alert that has stopped pulling in recent results even though a web search indicates that the pages are being indexed. None of the alert settings have changed. Anyone else have this happen recently and know how to remedy this problem?

I'm trying to make another push to get authors on my site to set up authorship. Can anyone point me in the direction of any official stats from Google on the impact of authorship on SERP click-throughs? I've seen some articles on SEO sites that make it seem like the lift is anywhere from 20-40%, but those seem to be site specific cases. I'm wondering if there's any broader studies out there or official data from G.

Thanks!

We've been transitioning a large site to a new CMS for the last few months and we are finally getting ready to move the homepage and high level sections. Are there any good articles or tips for this portion of our migration?

URLs will be staying the same so redirects aren't needed, we're recreating all the existing metadata in the new CMS, we are rebuilding our sitemaps in the new platform, etc.

I wasn't sure if there were specific things I should pay close attention to for the homepage & section fronts that are different from other pages on the site when migrating.

Thanks in advance!

Thanks. I had a feeling this was the case, but I just wanted some confirmation.

Currently, if you search for my site's brand name on Google, we are the top result. However, rather than having 2 columns of sitelinks, there is just one line of 4 sitelinks. When you search for the site's domain (sitename.com), you get the full 2 columns of sitelinks. Are there any strategies for getting the 2 columns on more than just the domain name search? At the very least, I'd like to get 2 columns to appear when you do a brand name search, but it'd be great to get 2 columns of sitelinks for our top search queries as well.

Thanks for the advice...

Does a duplicate content penalty impact specific pages or entire sites? If I wanted to test using the cross-domain canonical on a certain section of my site, would the impact be visible? Or would I need to put cross-domain canonicals on everything appearing on both sites in order to see the results?

If I used the cross-domain canonical, would that mean that one site would stop appearing in search results?

Changing the articles or even page titles is not an option.

I manage two sites that share some content. Currently we do not use a cross-domain canonical URL and allow both sites to be fully indexed. For business reasons, we want both sites to appear in results and need both to accumulate PR and other SEO/Social metrics. How can I manage the threat of duplicate content and still make sure business needs are met?

My site has lots of reviews: Movies, TV, Music, Restaurants, etc. I'm looking for sites that take critic reviews and link back to the critic's site. We're already on Metacritic.com and Rottentomatoes.com, which seems to be the two biggies for movies & tv. But I'm sure there are more out there. Also, I'd love to find sites for restaurant reviews (specifically in the Boston area). Are there any lists out there of sites like these? I'm NOT looking for UGC sites that allow user reviews. I'm looking for sites that accept professional critic reviews, preferably via some sort of automated feed.

Thanks Mozzers!

Thanks Robert. As you surmised, our URLs are not changing (thankfully!). Fortunately, for now, our Google News sitemap still works. The only arguments I've come up with so far are:

1. Having a sitemap will help SEs recrawl updated stories faster.
2. Having a sitemap will help SEs find out when a URL has changed.

In my experience, Google does not index changes to existing pages as quickly as newly published articles. My thinking is that if we supply the changes via sitemap, reindexing speed will improve.

Thoughts?

I work on a large news site that is constantly being crawled by Google. Googlebot is hitting the homepage every 5-10 minutes. We are in the process of moving to a new CMS which has left our sitemap nonfunctional. Since we are getting crawled so often, I've met resistance from an overwhelmed development team that does not see creating sitemaps as a priority. My question is, are they right? What are some reasons that I can give to support my claim that creating an xml sitemap will improve crawl efficiency and indexing if we are already having new stories appear in Google SERPs within 10-15 minutes of publication? Is there a way to quantify what the difference would be if we added a sitemap?

Would it be a problem if I used a canonical with a query string but did not change the video URL? A new tracking system we'd like to use is based off of the canonical URL. So for tracking reasons we want to append the canonical URL with the video's unique ID. Making this change is easy, but to change the actual video URLs will require a bit more dev work. Is this going to cause problems?

Video on my site all resides at www.mydomain.com/video in a player that does not assign unique URLs for each video. We may be able to rewrite the URLs to include a unique identifier found in the video's metadata (www.mydomain.com/video/?bctid=17769780). If I did this, how would it impact the canonical URL? Do the SEs accept canonicals with query strings? What if I only changed the canonical URL and did not change the video's URL? Would that be a problem?

Option 1)      In the browser, we use javascript to determine if you meet the redirect conditions (referrer not mydomain.com and no bypassing query-string).  If so, then we direct your browser to the subdomain.mydomain.com URL.  Googlebot would presumably get the original page.

Option 2)      In the browser, we use javascript to determine if you meet the redirect conditions.  If so, we trigger different CSS that hides certain components of the page and use javascript to load in extra ads.  Googlebt would get the unaltered page.

In both scenarios the page content does not change. However, the presentation is different. The idea is that under certain conditions users are redirected to a page with more ads. The ads are not too severe on the redirected page and will not cause an above the fold penalty. That said, will either option be considered cloaking by Google?

Is there a site that archives Google Trends' hourly Hot Searches data? I'd like to see if specific keywords were trending at a specific time yesterday. Is this data out there? Is there a different site I should be using for this info?

We actually didn't end up using infinite scroll. But, if I were to use it, I'd probably just create a static html page that periodically updates throughout the day and use it as the canonical URL and for internal linking purposes. I know it's not ideal, but it's a solution I've used in the past with decent results for dynamically generated pages.

A client of mine's site is currently sitename.com. www.sitename.com redirects to the non-www URL and the canonical is using the non-www URL.  This is a fairly new site and there aren't many existing inbound links. Is there a benefit to switching this?