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If I remember there /was/ a good reason one way or the other for using cookieless domains and such to optimise image delivery e.t.c., it can only be done with your website on one and images on the other, but I can not remember which was around it was, and what  senerio brings it about at the moment.

I prefur the www. version mostly due to all our competitors using it, so we look 'odd' when next to them. People expect to see the www.

If you have lots of duplicate content, the chances are your url structure is causing it in which case the problem will return with every blog post, so deleting is probably not the answer.

Check the obvious things like is it caused by having a www. and non-www. version, if it accessable via diffrent capatalisation, and fix any related issues.

The other common things to check are tag and catagory pages which can easly end up looking exactly the same. Fix what you can before deleting the content, else you risk masking the problem.

I would prerform the serch yourself in a chrome incognito browser and just looks at the serps.

Is there for exampe, a pack of 6 results taking up that first slot, essentaly making you poition 7+?

Are all the other results dis-similar to you? In which case you might not be what people are searching for.

If your getting impressions, are in the right slot, and theres nothing else odd, compare your meta description to the number 1. People might just be looking at you and thinking you are providing somethign else.

One other way of looking at this, especaly if you have a short domain is that a shorter url uses up less of character limits on social sites, forum sigs, or any other senario where you might otherwise have to use a url shortener to post the link.

It's a slight benifit, but it may mean the diffrence between sharing yourname.com or goog.gl/code, the former of which is usualy prefurable for brand reconition at least.

I would look into the reactions of consumers who realise you own all the websites.

If it looks unnatural, you might have trust issues and effect conversion. If I for example didn't see a major brand trying to sell me a certain product in the surps, I would be wondering if theres something funny going on with them.

Might be a non-issue, but thats the only other 'trap' that comes to mind.

There's the manual request in Web Master Tools.

Though that they're indexed and not the 301 of the page seems odd. Make sure there is a crawlable link to each page somewhere in your site, perhaps even make sure they are still in your sitemap, and not blocked by robots.txt. That should allow google to re-crawl the pages and realise they have been 301.

Also check how the 301 is implimented. Make sure theres not some kind of masking that is redirecting users and not google. Also make sure it is a 301 and not a 302.

In that case, I've seen a few people try it with no notable diffrence. Pre-Penguin there were a few cases here were removing several instances of a keyword in the body seemed to dramaticaly improve rankings, but thats more removing keyword stuffing then optimising your page to apear unoptimised.

Right now, if your keyword can be there and it reads naturally, then I don't see much reason for it not to be there. In contrast, if you whole page is about blue widgets ad the heading /doesn't/ include blue widgets, you'll be confusing people. People also link using the heading/title occassionaly, so you should pull off a few genuinely natural links with that heading.

At least as far as penguin goes, it seems much more link anchor oriented right now.

Meny directories are still providing link juice, and it tends to be the least spammy ones.

I would say the best rule of thumb is any directory you would sign up due to the potential value of traffic from it is going to be relitivly safe to go for as it will be providing real value and thus less likly to be crushed by google.

Directories for links sake is more risky.

From a navigation point of view, being able to erase the end of a url and end up at a parent is excelent for UX. As is not having to recall a file type (the .htm)

It wouldn't thus entirely surpise me if google favoured such a structure.

I expect however, google infurs such relationships from your onsite interlinking more. - Breadcumbs for example would probably have more effect. (I do belive there is a markup for them in webmaster tools, or at least was one being beta'd recently)

I personaly wouldn't do such a change less there were other issues being fixed at the same time. (Improving UX would count). Make sure of course to do you 301's and change the internal links if you do.

.NET is not a CMS system. It is a language your CMS is written in. (As in you can have the same menu in english and also in french, you could in theory have the same CMS in .php and .NET).

You'd need to give the name of the CMS if you want advice on it's suitability.

Honestly, your developer should be able to 301 from URL a to b without loops based on the info provided so far.

Looking at the footer of your website, I see "Powered by Communications3000 C3MS"

From a quick look of the site it links to I'm guessing it's something your webdevelopers have put together rather then an 'Off The shelf" cms so to speak.

I would recomend you find an SEO who knows both SEO and some .Net who could communicate with you and your developers to see if it is indeed impossable to do a 301, or if your developers are making excuses/misunderstanding the request/e.t.c.

That would probably give a better understanding of the situation.

As everyone else has said  it /does/ sound rather odd that a 301 can't be implimented between the various ways of doing it.