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Restaurant names/brand names are different? If that's the case I'd suggest you stick with one Website for each one of them and if you'd like you can link them together with a nofollow link.
From an SEO perspective, you can get more authority if you use a single domain for both, but if I look it from the user point of view, 2 sites seems much more appropriate, and Google says every day: think, and build to users.
It is ultimately your choice, those are just my 2 cents 
First you should fix the website to only serve the page that tracks the conversion in one or the other protocol, HTTP or HTTPS, as those are in fact different pages for Google.
That applies to the entire site actually, all your pages should redirect to the HTTP or HTTPS versions, you can have HTTP and HTTPS pages on the same site, but each single page should only load on one of the protocols, and the other should redirect to the "default" for that page.
That should be an easy fix for your programmer. If your internal links point to pages with uppercase letters in them, then have the canonical tags with the uppercase. Almost always, uppercase and lowercase loads the same content as the rewrite rules use the URL to look on the products using a DB that does not distinguish uppercase & lowercase automatically (in MySQL, you can force the query to do so, but that will be actually more difficult to just change the way the programmed made the canonical tags). You should also redirect the pages that are duplicate to the original ones, if they have uppercase letters (the original) then the lowercase version should redirect to the uppercase one (once the canonical tags are properly set).
From MY OWN PERSONAL point of view, I always preferred lowercase URLs... if that's the case there's a little more coding to do, but you will end up with all URLs in lowercase (for some reason almost all CMS automatically convert uppercase letters to lowercase in a page URL, like Wordpress does).
Hope that helps!
How many static pages do you have excluding the blog? (and by static on also mean VERY different one to another).
There are several services that migrate HTML sites to wordpress and their prices depend on the site size. You only need to consider the static pages (that have completely different design) and the basic blog pages (blog listing, author, archive and the single post pages). Once you have the exact amount of pages you need you can ask for quotes on those sites specialized on doing this kind of work.
Hi Papp,
What you are asking is the million dollar question... there's no right answer. To get traffic you need basically 2 things:
A great Website. And excellent content (whatever the niche is, it could also be the "best products" if you were selling something, or the "best service").
The real question here is: do your websites have what they need to rank in the SERPs? I'm quite sure, that 10 - 30 "seo'ed" articles are not even near enough unless those articles that you published are something really extraordinary that you can't find anywhere else, say a medical research for example.
My advice? Take one of the sites first, and try to do something amazing. If you are able to monetize that first one with AdSense, then you would have learned what is needed to do it with the other sites.
How long have you waited since you applied all the rules to avoid duplicate content, as if it was just recently, then Google should be "rebuilding" the index of your site and stats may be a little crazy while that is happening.
If it was over 2 month ago and you are seeing the increase now, then I'd suggest you revise the rules you created to see if your own Website isn't creating all those new pages.
Hope that helps.
Report the results to Google, not that they will actually care, but if you open a thread in the Webmaster Help Forums, someone from Google may see the thread and tell you what's going on.
Anyway, that's completely normal and I see that in every possible niche. Bad sites being ranked above good ones, they are just "awaiting" a drop, it will come, the question is when...
Try to get in touch with someone at google, tweet Cutts, open a thread in WHF, write about it, get the word out. If you really deserve a better spot then all that may get Google's attention.
I think the best structure would be the easier to read:
I'd personally use example.com/clothing -> example.com/dresses -> example.com/dresses-kelly-maxi (but this actually something you decide.. there's no golden rule to follow. If the content is good you can even have example.com?cat_id=5 and rank perfectly well).
In this case, there's no need to repeat "clothing" it is already understood when you say "dresses".
As for the filters, the best way is to use URL parameters, following the example above: example.com/dresses-kelly-maxi?sort-by=price&order=desc
Any possible combination of the filter should point to the page where all the options are listed "naturally". If by default example.com/dresses-kelly-maxi is sorted by date added, then the canonicals on any possible filter you offer should point to that page.
Hope that helps!
The stats in the page are from 2013, if you are going to present stats for 2014, then create a new page. You only need to update when the content becomes irrelevant, but for those stats, they will still be relevant in 10 years, they are "stats from 2013".
Hope that helps.
Every time you make a redirect, 301, some of the pagerank is diluted. So following your example, from going from A to C you should redirect both A and B to C, not A -> B -> C as you double the loss.
Redirects are just fine, and in my opinion, they should say for as long as the pages being redirected still get organic traffic (backlinks, search, etc.). The moment you see no more traffic, and the links pointing to that redirected page fixed (point to the new page) you can safely remove the redirection. For as on the amount of redirects, it won't be a problem if you have lots of them, unless you do multiple redirects from A to G going from one page to the other until reaching the final, working version.
If that's not your scenario and A redirects directly to G, then you are fine. Monitor traffic on A and see if at some point you can remove the redirection, otherwise just leave is there (I personally have redirects that have been there for over 3 years as the pages are still getting organic traffic (mainly from links).
Hope that helps! And a happy new year to you too!
I'd suggest you nofollow all those links. You say "which don’t really fit the mold for “excessive link exchanging.”" but you are forgetting that each page will contain the same link, therefore creating god knows how many backlinks from ALL the pages in your site to the other sites, and the same for all the others.
As an example, I had a manual link penalty applied, and when applying for a reconsideration, which was declined, the example links given by Google included a link to my business site from MY OWN personal site, something that said "I am the Owner of X" being X the link, and THAT link was one of the 3 examples in the negatory.
So again, I'd suggest you nofollow all those links, and actually only doing it if the sites are really related to one another. Read the article about something that Amazon is doing and EVERYONE thinks they should be penalized for: http://www.seroundtable.com/amazon-footer-links-spam-17857.html
Hope that helps!
Personally I re-create my sitemap automatically every day at a specific time. When a new post is published, it gets automatically shared on G+, twitter and Facebook, which somehow forces Google and others to crawl the page right away and get it indexed. You don't need to add the url to your sitemap immediately and then resubmit it, rather, you need to add it to the blog feed and have the feed as a sitemap in GWT and BWT, that should be it.
I use an automated software that works with any PHP enviroment xml-sitempas.com (paid version) that lets you chose several configurations and ways to create the sitemap, along with images, news, etc. Once the sitemap is re-created, it automatically pings Google and others to re-crawl it.
Hope that helps!
My 2 cents:
Nothing to worry about. You won't repeat the word on EVERY page on your site. You are just doing it in the homepage. Plus, using the brand in all the other pages, will give Google (and others) a clue about the brand name:
Index: NLP Training and Certification Center | NLP and Coaching Institute
2nd Page: 2nd page | NLP and Coaching Institute
etc.Hope that helps.
There are over 200 factors Google considers to rank sites. I've seen sites that are just published being ranked above sites with over 7 or more years in business. It all changes and their algorithm is always trying to guess what is the visitor looking for.
In my niche, there are 2 sites above me, ranked 2nd and 3rd, with no authority, no backlinks, no content, not a good design/page/service, etc, still they are STILL there.
The data Moz shows can give you a CLUE on how is your site performing, but it will be even better if you see their data as trends. For example, you start to create new content daily, GOOD, interesting content, you then see a boost in your rankings, still not getting the place you think you deserve, don't worry, that trend shows you that creating content is working, keep doing it.
You can also ask for some help in the Google Webmaster Forums, the guys there are usually rude, but almost always right
Hope that helps.
I'd suggest you create only one Google+ Page focused on your brand. You can then add the G+ page batch on all subdomains if you want, as maintaining multiple G+ pages could be a little difficult, not to mention you will get more traction promoting your brand.
Moz does it for you if you have a PRO+ account
Anyway, the thing here is that archive, tag and author pages (pagination) do not provide ANY value to the user or Google itself, therefore it should be better no noindex while leaving the follow tag to let the pagerank flow to the pages that DO matter: POSTS.
That could be a problem, yes. static.domain.com is another domain that www.domain.com and therefore the sitemap should be in www.domain.com for URLs on www.domain.com.
I've seen image sitemaps in www.domain.com where all the images are on a subdomain, like static.domain.com and that wasn't an issue, but personally I'd suggest you put the sitemap in the www.domain.com.
There's another service, provided by McAfee that scans your site for possible vulnerabilities and even provides with a bath ONLY if your site is proven to be safe and you fix any issue they can find. Can't remember the price though, but I used it in the past and they scan the entire site daily, totally recommended.
Yes, google crawls and understands almost every language, so you shouldn't have any problem.
Make sure you add the appropriate (changing "es" for whatever language you will use).