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As long as you use a 301-redirect and report the change to google via google webmasters tools you will be fine. The rankings should transfer fine to the new domain.

As long as the old domain stays active and redirects the incoming links to the new domain using a 301-redirect it shouldn't matter whether they point to the old or the new domain.

Straight links should in theory be good though? (Like the following as a example: "Hosted by "Wehostthissite ?

I have no good answer here, but i would like one.

However: I can say that i haven't noticed any negative effect myself on one site where we have quite a bit of site-wide links on other sites due to the site owners giving us a small link in the header/footer. Seeing that this definately is "legit" links i would hope that there should be no negative changes due to this.

Hi.

Extended Validation = Gives you the green bar in the address-field of the browser. Requires extra manual activation. Some users will notice this and trust your site. Not neccessary for most sites tbh,

Other than that: Get one of GeoTrust's certificates. They are quite cheap, and naturally they work fine. RapidSSL is usually enough for most users. All browsers recognize this.

My pleasure.

And no, not really. Ofcourse, if you place the servers on a crappy connection in Australia you might experience some latency/slow loading from the EU/US, but as long as you keep it in EU/US you should be all good. Any good european or american provider should do nicely.

Feel free to ask if there is anything else.

Hi.

I mean both for customer data and for your own information. If you host in the US all your data suddenly is under US law. (The same applies if you host with a american company on european soil afaik. All google's services in the EU for example is under US law due to it being a US company.)

The difference in response-time for the clients from the US is basically not noticeable if you host in the UK.

Ignoring that, i've had some experience with Liquidweb in the past, they are quite good at what they do.

Edit/Disclaimer: It's been quite a few years since i used them, and it wasn't for that much. But atleast they were good then.

Hi.

Server location doesn't matter that much to be honest. If you are based in the UK i would definately host the servers in the UK. Makes it easier in case of legal matters, privacy-issues and so on. The response time from the US to the UK is quite good, the same goes for pretty much everywhere else to the UK.

I'd avoid having the server in the US due to the privacy-issues and possible legal issues. It also makes it easier in case you experience problems with your provider.

Is this a high-traffic site?

Thank you very much, did not know that list existed.

I can definately understand the need to invest. Have considered it on several occations myself, but haven't done it yet. Somewhat because of the cost, but mostly because i have no idea which of the paid sites that are actually worth paying for. Would be nice with a list of the sites that are actually worth the money so you can avoid the useless ones.

1: You never "need" to invest in a paid directory, just consider the price vs the returns. Personally i never pay for listings or links. I believe that the free services should be more than enough.

2: One listing on a high-ranking directory will ofcourse give you a small boost, but i'd assume that you would need a few listings to notice any permanent change in your ranking.

I'm not a expert on the SEO-bit, but generally i wouldn't bother with it. You have existing domains that work well, you have site(s) that's known in your market-segment and a well-known brand. In my opinion it won't do you any good to use http://a.brand instead of http://brand.com . .com-domains and national TLDs are well known amongst the users of the internet, new things/weird domains tend to scare people.

But if you/your company can afford to get a gTLD for your brand it would probably be a nice thing to just have "lying around" just in case. But i wouldn't bother spending a lot of work on it.

Edit: Checked your company, seeing that it's a furniture-company i wouldn't bother with it at all. Your customer-base seems to be "all the people". "All the people" are usually happy as long as they can find your-company.com/.no and so on.

OT: Nice to see more norwegians in here. Hi!

As far as i know FB and Twitter uses nofollow on all links so it wouldn't affect your search engine ranking anyway. Since you're doing a 301 all visitors should be redirected to the correct page anyway. So i wouldn't worry too mucch about it.

Links to categories/login/search/facebook/links in the post + 57 comments with links in them will easily add up to 100+ links on the page.

Thanks for the good advice.

Money is not really the issue, just not a fan of all the directories online, probably somewhat affected by all the directory-services calling me trying to sell me listings for insane amounts of money. (Local services here in Norway.)

Good tips on using opensiteexplorer. Will definately take a look there.

Hi.

I've added my site to dmoz.org 3-4 months ago or something. Still not accepted (surprise..)

Anyway, i was wondering if there is any other sites like dmoz.org i can add my site to? (Free sites, not interested in the countless "pay for express listing"-sites).

As far as i know all links from facebook to your site is nofollow. So whatever you name your site it won't affect your Pagerank.

I am not very familiar with IIS, but i think this link should help you do this:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/313074

I guess you could try too use Google webmasters tools to add the site again: http://www.google.com/webmasters

Edit:

Maxwell: It was my understanding that google ignores the META Description? I would assume that the reason for that text is that google crawled the site when it was undergoing upgrades/construction.

Well, i'm not in any position to give a definite answer to this. But i've had my Pro-account for ~48 hours or so now and it's still stuck on 250 pages. Afaik it says 2-3 days so i guess we just have to be patient and wait.

Thank you Joseph.

The site is faster than 77% of the sites online according to google. Could probably be tuned to be a bit faster i guess.

I'm going to try to tune the server a bit to make it faster, might also try to disable https on most of the site (except the billing-system) for a while to see if it has any impact on the speed according to google.