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"will Google simply view the new as an extension of the old -i.e a part of it"

Google will see the new entity as a new website, even with the redirects. They will crawl all the new pages, and assign it rank based upon the quality score of the content, SEO, backlinks, etc etc.

The redirects can help with passing juice from one site to another, but as already stated they do not pass the full amount. The most helpful part of a redirect is for users, so when you change your website you can still be found.

I would see what the old domain has going for it. Look up the domain age, backlinks acquired through the years, social and citation links, current rankings, etc. Look for reasons to keep it.

In my experience, even if you do all your redirects perfectly and catch every single page, you will still see some form of ranking loss temporarily while Google indexes the new site. Seems like it throws them off for a while.

All that being said, if the new domain is catchy, easy for users to remember and has a keyword or two in the domain name, it may be worth it to change. I think it all depends how much work you want to do to get the new domain rocking.

One Site To Rule Them All

*sorry, I had too, lol

I dont think 404 errors hurt your site. If you have that many pages, they are most likely crawling your site a lot anyway. Have you set your crawl frequency in your sitemap? On bigger sites that get frequent updates, we set the crawl frequency to daily rather than weekly.

If possible, try to see if there are any top level items you can submit a URL removal request for. Hopefully this can speed up the process fo getting the URL's removed. This process can take a long time for Google to take care of. After changing websites we still had 404 errors after 6 months, even after submitting the URL removal request.

Another option is to have the page render a 410 rather than a 404. A 410 states to the search engine the page is gone, and will not be coming back. If you are using some form of cart system or cms there might be a way to apply the code to a large number of pages at once, rather than trying to manually code 100k pages.

"410 Gone
The requested resource is no longer available at the server and no forwarding address is known. This condition is expected to be considered permanent. Clients with link editing capabilities SHOULD delete references to the Request-URI after user approval. If the server does not know–or has no facility to determine–whether or not the condition is permanent, the status code 404 (Not Found) should be used instead of 410 (Gone).  This response is cacheable unless indicated otherwise."

Worse case scenero, you could set them to no-index, or just leave them be. Even if they dont lead anywhere logically, they could still bring you traffic. Or redirect them to the closest thing that is on the site currently.

Google has stated that duplicate content will be penalized, if it is deemed that the content is meant to manipulate search results. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359

"In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we'll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. As a result, the ranking of the site may suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results."

If two pages both have the same content, even with a canoical url Google will choose which one to index most likely the newer version of that page.
"Google tries hard to index and show pages with distinct information. This filtering means, for instance, that if your site has a "regular" and "printer" version of each article, and neither of these is blocked with a noindex meta tag, we'll choose one of them to list."

I would not recommend having duplicate content on your site if it can be avoided. If it can't, set one of the pages you dont want indexed to "no-index".

Yes, unless you have a compelling reason to change them. By changing the names you are just creating more work for yourself. Was there a reason you were wanting to name them something different?

Changing the name (if you choose to do so) of the sitemap is not going to have an effect on already-indexed URL's. I dont see any reason that you should modify the names unless you are trying to organize them better

When you say winning, do you mean ranking higher, or getting indexed instead of your store's pages?

Chances are your blog posts are targeted directly at certain questions and information and have links pointing back at them. Do your store pages have the same? Most stores have an area when you can add information to the landing pages.

Can you provide a link to the store, so that I may have a closer look? It's difficult to give you a accurate answer without seeing how the store/blog is set up.

Google has not stated anything saying that is is harder for new websites to rank quickly, and I doubt that they would implement something like that into their alogorithm. The reason is it harder for a new website to rank is due to the lack of backlinks and ciatation sources. Without a history, it's harder for Google to see if a website is better or worse than others. This is why they place such a high  prioroity on backlinks, as it tells them a broad picture of how trustworthy a site or domain really is. This is one of many factors, but its an important one to consider.

You stated that you have backlinks, have you checked to see if all of them are followed? If the link is not followed, it will only help to direct traffic at your site, not pagerank or weight.

I know a lot of people say this, but focus on laying out your page in a way that will help the user. Moving all your text higher up on the page will not make a magic improvement in your ranking, and I fear that you will spend a lot of time modifying and not get the results you want. Spend time creating really nice listing pages, and having other sites link back to them. Focus on gaining high quality relationships with real estate sites that have authority in the eyes of consumers, and in search engines. Look at large sites that are already successful in search results, and see what you can learn from them. We wrote an article a while back about analyzing your competitors SEO strategy. Might be worth a read for you. Focus on the content of your site, improving the conversion messages, improving the keyword density, and your overall message.

Thats where I would start

If the canonical link is not set, its possible you will get additional pages indexed for the same content especially if you are using a CMS. The best course of action would be to do a site search for your domain, and see how may pages are indexed. If you know you have 200 pages on your site, and you have 2000 indexed, you most likely have some duplicates showing up. We wrote an article about avoiding duplicates through htaccess earlier this month. Might be worth a read if you have not set any of those rules for your site. CMS's (Wordpress, Joomla) can be tricky to get duplicate pages under control.

*edit Looking at your indexed pages, you are showing 122,000 links indexed for your site. If that isn't the case, you should look into assigning canonical links for all your posts, and if they are already indexed, processing redirects. You can also use Google's URL parameter tool to help, althought this tool should be used with caution if you don't know how to use it.

301 Redirect and forget it. The only other thing to watch for is if the "admissions" page has multiple versions or URLs. If it has a login function, or is in a CMS I would double check for duplicate or alternate versions of that page.

The 301 redirect is the fast way to get rid of a page. The slow way that actually deletes it from Google and their index is to do a URL removal, and add a 410 rule for that page URL. 410 tells search engines the page is "gone" literally. This generally takes about a week for Google to notice, but can potentially take longer.

Always link by page and subject matter. If you have an article about red widgets, you should link back to the page you have about red widgets. True you can build up your home page with a lot of links, but this hurts your user experience by making them have to go through the entire site to find what they came there for.

When you send all your links to the homepage, you are suggesting what page is the most important to search engines. This can often be seen where you have sites that never have any subpages ranking or showing up in search results, only the home page over and over. Sounds great doesnt it? But you can limit the exposure of your site in the long run. By directing links at your subpages, not only do you increase the chance that they will eventually rank higher, you also can get more specific with your linking text.

Direct keyword linking to the home page is more risky. With your subpage links, you can get closer or even use exact keyword phrase links because the content is more specific. In reality, use whatever link phrase that a user will click on. A bunch of keywords might not do that job as well as a conversion statement. If you are worried about getting people to your home page, change the way the subpages are set up on your site, so that users can go to the other relevant areas of your site with ease. It should be easy and simple to direct them where you want them to go using graphics or styled text.

I wouldn't go about restructuring the whole site. Keep in mind page authority is a part of having visits and links coming to that page. Since they are both important pages of the site (terms and privacy) chances are you link to those pages more than any other, thus giving them a higher PA.

You could link off of those pages to other internal pages, or create another menu at the top that points to them. In this situation a 301 is not required, as you wouldn't gain any benefit from redirecting them. For example: redirecting a privacy page to another page you want to rank would most likely have the adverse effect of what you are trying to accomplish since the pages are not relevant to one another.

Google likes simple, keep it simple. You can still add the links at the top without doing any redirects. I would expand where you are at now with new content and pages, rather than get rid of or redirect what is already working for you.

- D

Doubtful that one mention of the work or keyword phrase is having that much of an effect. Ecommerce store frequently have a higher keyword density, and I think Google can tell the difference. We have done work for multiple ecom clients, in which the competition would stuff the living daylights out of the meta and on page and still rank very high. Not saying its a great idea, just noting an observation.

As to your situation, I wouldn't bother with changing it. I would instead look at your on-page keyword density to avoid it getting too high.

Here, use this: http://goo.gl/cdPni2

There was a Panda update that happened on September 5th. For reference:

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-panda-update-19126.html

http://www.hmtweb.com/marketing-blog/panda-update-september-5-2014/

If you are looking for the fastest way to do this, just clone and backup your existing WP site and database, then move to your test environment and start building your new site there. That way you will already have all of your old blog posts in place, and save a ton of time, especially if the blog has been styled to look like the main URL.

For the blog, I agree with others in stating you should keep it as part of your main website. Doesnt make sense to have it on a subdomain unless you have to, like your old ASP configuration.

As long as you properly redirect all pages to the https version, you should be fine. Google released an update a while back stating that secure sites could perform better in search results as it offered users additional security and trust. If you are going through the trouble of updating your site to an SSL, I would set the entire site to fall under the https, not just the payment pages. Google will like it, users will like it. The only drawback I can see is if your account is set up to use shared IP's, in which case you may have to make some modifications if required by your development team.

Here is the quote from Google on this subject:

"Security is a top priority for Google. We invest a lot in making sure that our services use industry-leading security, like strong HTTPS encryption by default. That means that people using Search, Gmail and Google Drive, for example, automatically have a secure connection to Google.

Beyond our own stuff, we’re also working to make the Internet safer more broadly. A big part of that is making sure that websites people access from Google are secure. For instance, we have created resources to help webmasters prevent and fix security breaches on their sites.

We want to go even further. At Google I/O a few months ago, we called for “HTTPS everywhere” on the web.

We’ve also seen more and more webmasters adopting HTTPS (also known as HTTP over TLS, or Transport Layer Security), on their website, which is encouraging.

For these reasons, over the past few months we’ve been running tests taking into account whether sites use secure, encrypted connections as a signal in our search ranking algorithms. We've seen positive results, so we're starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal. For now it's only a very lightweight signal — affecting fewer than 1% of global queries, and carrying less weight than other signals such as high-quality content — while we give webmasters time to switch to HTTPS. But over time, we may decide to strengthen it, because we’d like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web."

It's worth mentioning that if the SEO on the site stinks, an SSL will not rescue it from the bowels of page 10 ranking status.

Hope this helps!

As long as the page loads quick for users then I wouldn't put a huge focus on this. True that Google looks at page load speed, but I wouldn't put all your eggs in that basket. We have sites that show a 2.5-3.5 second load time, and they still dominate ranking results. Focus on creating a better experience.

One of the simple ways to speed up load times is to minify and compress CSS and Javascript files as small as possible, but be sure to check that the minification does not break areas of the site. We have seen improvements as high as 75% just from completing this step alone.

If you have a Joomla or WordPress website, here is a great plugin that will do this for you: https://www.jch-optimize.net/

This is based upon personal research, so take this with a grain of salt.

From what I have seen, they will use the desktop version as the basis for rankings and placement. If your desktop site placement is great, the mobile will be great as well.

For mobile, it seems like the only time this will change the ranking placement is dependent upon location, as mobile plays a big part of "where are you?" and serves up the most relevant results based upon where a user is physically located.

Most of what goes into making a site do great in search (for local biz) is relevant content and a strong citation profile. The desktop content authority should carry over into the domain/page authority of your mobile version, and you should not see much (if any) ranking fluctuation between the two.

Hope this helps!