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Are both pages being indexed? If so, you won't lose the http:// version because googlebots are treating them as two separate pages.

Yeah, they haven't been working that great for me either. Seems like the problem's been going on for a while: http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2012/04/10/google-alerts

SEO sites that make it seem like the lift is anywhere from 20-40% I don't think that it did anything for my CTR. I don't think that it did anything for my rankings either.

Just test on a demo server before going live and back everything up. There shouldn't be much of a difference between transferring homepage v other pages (although without knowing a specific CMS, I can't give any specific tips). Make sure canonical urls are correct and run a crawler to test for broken links.

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

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?

I agree with Robert on all points. To keep it out of the dev team's overwhelmed hands, just use http://code.google.com/p/googlesitemapgenerator/ or one of the many free generators online to create your sitemaps intermittently. Maybe 3 months or 6 months down the road the dev team can come up with something when they're less crushed from the site move and you can have them do something similar to Google XML sitemaps plugin for Wordpress which updates the sitemap everytime you add new content.  Until then, submitting the freely generated ones should give Google at least a little heads up and feel like you're doing the right thing.

the canonical tag must go to a valid url that is unique per video. you need to update the canonical and url at the same time.

Matt Cutts has discussed this pretty well. Cloaking means specifically showing something different to Google than to the user. Hidden content is not specifically cloaking, it is a different issue altogether. If I had to choose between the two options, I would choose the second. The 302 redirect can be problematic. You should assume that Google is going to find BOTH of these and execute the javascript appropriately. Just don't make anything on your site behave differently specifically for Google. LivingSocial and Groupon both do javascript redirects and are not suffering the consequences, so I think you should be fine too.

This isn't so much an SEO question as it is a branding and perception question. I think the prevailing wisdom is to ask yourself, "How tech savvy are my customers". If they're technophiles, go with the non-www version because its shorter, easier to tweet and print on cards, and is just more hip these days. If they're not so tech-savvy you'll want to go to the www version so that your customers see it and know they're looking at a web address. Just my 0.02c

I've got a fairly large site, so I'm going to need to use an index for the individual sitemap files. Do you think it's ok to just include my mobile sitemaps on my regular sitemap index file? Or should the two be completely separate?

I found this resource a few days ago, have a look please, I think it answers your question. http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2013/01/23/html5-vs-native-mobile-apps-myths-and-misconceptions/

any thoughts on the impact of removing the internal links in the sitemap? will this hurt our domain authority? Or given the low amount of links compared to our whole link profile, is it not that significant to cause concern?

Is your content something that the Reddit audience would be interested in? If so, put effort into being a part of the community and help push some of your better pieces of content. If you are only spending time on Reddit to attempt to get some link juice, I think you could put your time to better use to participating on other sites closer to your niche. Use Reddit for the traffic and potential new customers/subscribers, not the link juice.

It sure is, read the link i sent you, it explains why. This is not a big job, and it is very important

I think your follow-up comment is a good bet - either use rel-canonical to a "View All" version or use the rel=prev/next tags. A canonical back to page 1 of comments is technically not endorsed by Google (although, honestly, it would still probably work in most cases). If you don't feel the comments add any SEO value, you could also just META NOINDEX pages 2, 3, etc.

Hello Jon, Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum. You've asked one of those questions for which there still isn't a 100% percent satisfactory answer, but I'll do my best to provide you with some excellent resources here. The trouble is, that unless you are doing KW research for a pretty major area, tools are often likely not to actually show you appropriate geo modifiers. However, I was recently speaking with Darren Shaw of Whitespark (awesome company) about this and will quote his advice to you, which is about as good as it gets on this topic. Use Google Adwords tool without the location modifier, supplement with data from Google Insights, Suggest, and Related. Build a huge list. Then, remove all location-oriented KWs from your list and set them aside temporarily. Then, go through the list again and remove any KWs that don't trigger local search results in the search engines, or don't bring up your competitors in the search engines. Set those aside, too. Next, go through the list again and identify all main keyword terms. These are keepers. So, if you're in the vacation rental business, then 'vacation rental' would be in this list. Then, go through the list again and identify plurals, more descriptive terms, combined terms, etc. So, here, in the same business, terms might be 'pet friendly vacation rentals'. At this point, you should have a really big list of main terms, plurals, longer terms, combined terms. Now you can add back in any geo terms that came up. So, you can have Vacation Rentals Boise, Idaho, as well as Pet Friendly Vacation Rentals Boise, Idaho and so on. At this point, your list will be quite huge because for every possible geo term, there are all of the non-geo keywords you have identified that you can add the geo terms to. Finally, if your research hasn't turned up any geo terms, it's likely that they aren't being tracked. Add them. Also, look at your analytics for any geo terms that didn't appear during your research. Add those to the list, too. From this step by step process, you should end up with a really good list. Also recommend you read these: http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/local-keyword-research/1787/ http://www.expand2web.com/blog/tips-for-using-google’s-keyword-research-tool-in-a-local-context/ Hope this helps! Miriam

Jon, Here's a couple of ideas for you - none of which will actually save you the hard work that is link building. Is all your content visible or is some of it hidden behind a subscribers firewall? If all your content is visible make check to see if your CMS has SEO functions and that your editors or "online content" folks know how to handle the on page aspects of the news story - good title tag, SEO relevant headline, etc. Your best stories to generate links are going to be positive pieces on local business or organizations. You'll have to request these links - contact the business and offer to provide them with the html link. Organizations will be glad to have been featured and it will raise their credibility to link to a story in the local newspaper. Your newspaper probably puts out some guides - like the Spring Wedding Guide or Annual Guide on Senior Citizens. Be sure you aggregate this content online and request links from advertisers and anyone who may have been featured in the product that has a website. List your site on local directories pointing to specific sections - classifieds, for example. Your newspaper no doubt ranks very high for "news" and "newspaper" on all local searches - but maybe not for Real Estate, or Weddings or Pets. Find sites that compliment this content and request links with the right anchor text. You've got an awesome problem - every site should have so much new, quality content developed everyday!\