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Hi Michael, SEO Text book and best practices, if there are any, say that whenever there are multiple pages that serve the same content ,and you acknowledge that only one of them is critical: redirect other pages to the primary. Thinking like this: redirect /index.asp to the root page. Just for the sake of clearing a little about the "there is some extra juice": Analyzing both pages through Moz's or any other private metric could lead you to wrong conclusions. Here, Moz creates its metrics with an algorithm taking into account links and some other magic.  Here some information about Moz's Page Authority Thinking like that, its perfectly normal that some other page gets more links and have different PA, even though being canonicals of each other. It also reinforces the idea that it should be redirected. On a side note, Google publicly said that doesn't use metrics like Moz's to rank a website/page. Just having a canonical is almost enough to transfer its authority. Hope it helps. Best luck Gaston

Glad to be of service and best of luck with the new designs! all the best, Sean

Hi Chris, Thank you - that is what I am referring too.  I work in taxes so I'm sure that we have some visually impaired customers - I will continue to put the attribute on my links! -The SEO Impaired

Thank you everyone!  I've come to the conclusion that I'll be waiting to make the transition until after the busy season. I appreciate all the help!

That's good to hear and thanks for the input! The MOZ page grader told me that over 100 links was too many and so did a commenter from a separate post.  All clear now though.

Thanks for all the help!

it's because its used by affiliate links. You can try to hide the links behind another one so technically its not in the email (it goes though the link) a link redirect kind of. Alternatively set up a landing page track users on that landing page combine with the email program tracker you can work out how many were sent, how many bounced and how many landed on the page. Hope that helps a little.

That's great - thank you again for all the help

The company page would be suited to the rel=publisher tag The better way to explain the author tag is like a book. On the back of the book you don't have info on the publisher but the author the same is true here, the tag is to say who wrote the content not who published it thus the two tags. So you want to use the author tag on the personal profile or who ever wrote it. in short: use your personal profile.

Michael - I don't see any major SEO issues with forcing an SSL session, other than: SSL is usually a bit slower, due to the encryption overhead.  You might want to benchmark this to make sure it's not affecting your site load speed times.  If things are slow, more hardware and caching might help. Make sure that all of your content is being served from secure links.  For example, if you are displaying a graphic on the home page of the site, use relative paths (../images/super-impressive-graphic.png).  If you have content that uses absolute links, such as: (img src="http://www.1099pro.com/images/super-impressive-graphic.png), this will throw an SSL warning and tell users that the site is not secure.  This is important with CSS, as well as Facebook, Twitter and other plugins. Looking at the site, it looks like your Google and LiveZilla tracking codes are set properly to auto-switch to https, but I'd try to test this. Also, if you're changing the URLs, you'll want to make sure that older pages with the non-www are 301 redirected to the secure pages properly, too. Hope this helps! Thanks, Jeff

Michael I don't think you will get anymore benefit from a 301 than you're getting from the cross-domain rel canonical tags that are already in place. However, I think the fact that you already have these cross-domain rel canonical tags i place, and that the content is identical, will make it much less likely that 301 redirecting those domains would be seen as any type of spam. If it were me, just so all of my users were on the same domain - and to keep the problem from getting worse over time - I would go ahead and 301 redirect the other domains, but on a page-to-page basis. In other words, each page would link directly to the page it is currently referencing as the rel canonical. This would be much better than redirecting them all to a single landing page, and would send signal that is consistent with the current one you are sending via the cross domain rel canonical. You might try this one domain at a time. Let the dust settle on that domain and, if all goes well, move on to the next. It may take a year to complete the project, but it might be the safest way to go. Alternatively, you could just continue to leave the other sites up with the cross domain rel canonical tag - but the problem is likely to just worsen over time as more people link to the other domains, and they develop their own sources of traffic via direct links, social, bookmarks, etc... outside of the SERPs.

Mike's response pretty much covers it, I would just add that there shouldn't be any negative effects with having 1099pro.com canon to itself, so don't worry about that.

I believe that google would consider these to be "cookie cutter pages".  That is when you have a standard page and several words or phrases are swapped in and according to the product. Google started targeting these pages  several years ago and they are getting better and better at identifying them. Their response to these types of pages can be.... -- filter most of them from the search results, this only hit the cookie cutter pages, but if you had lots of these pages it was a waste of the page rank that went into them that could have been used to support rankings on other parts of your site. -- recently these are starting to result in a panda problem which can tank the rankings across your site When you are offering these types of products the time required to write unique descriptions can pay off big time.   My approach is to make one page for several closely related items, offering all of them on a single page.  That makes a rich page instead of multiple near-duplicate pages.

Michael, Great question.  I always look at Google's Keyword planner to see how it treats it.  Couple things I noticed.  1) Google doesn't see a difference between lower-case and uppercase "E" in e-file.  2) Google lists 30 exact match searches for 1099 e-file software and none for 1099 efile software. I would probably go with "e-file" as the target keyword, and perhaps use "efile" in the text and alt-image text, just as a backup. Eric

I would have to second Gary Lee on this one. Chris as great info as well but like Chris is saying you probably need to do some rewriting.

Thanks CleverPhD!  That was the decisive answer I've been looking for

While having your desired keywords throughout your webpage is an effective tool for helping SE results, it is by no means the only factor. Some have even suggested that as time passes, Google will continue to diminish the importance of parts of this strategy. Even if it is not considered stuffing there are well over 200 factors that go into Google's algorithm. The loss in rankings can be caused by a number of potential issues. For example, poor quality links or other potential issues with the website may be hurting your results. It is difficult to determine the exact reasons without seeing your website. Another possibility is your competitors are utilizing more effective strategies in their marketing efforts to target those keywords, that is helping their website performance.