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IMO the most important thing is to put yourself in the mobile searcher's shoes.  When someone is searching on a mobile device rather than a computer they tend to be in a different mind set - meaning, they are not at their desk at work, they are not relaxing at home; they are waiting for their food to arrive, or standing in an elevator or, god forbid, driving.  They want what they are looking for immediately, without any distractions or funneling to other things they 'might' be interested in etc...  keep it as simple as you can and get them directly to what they want.  As far as optimizing for search, sure and Sankel and Thee design have both given good advice (thumbs up to both of you guys) but optimizing for the users intent can not be overlooked.

If they are for the same business and carry similar information than I would say the very best thing you could do would be to bring one down and redirect the domain to the other website.  Make sure to do a 301 (permanent) redirect.

As far as the file names, I would stay away from using website design in them as it is already in your domain.  My reason for this is from practical experience:

Our clients are very locally based - meaning all of their important shopping terms include their location (city).  Many times the domain name will include the city and for a long time it was standard practice to also include the city in different file names throughout the website.  Right around the time that Panda started up we noticed those specific pages starting to drop - pages that had the city in the file name on websites that also had the city in the domain.  Now, I know that correlation does not equal causation but when I started changing file names and we started seeing rankings come back.... well... I figured it was counting as Over Optimization.

As far as your titles and headers etc... I am sure this is fine, but I would certainly stay away from having the term repeat in the absolute URL by having it in both the domain and the file name.

Cheers!

Where I work we provide both template and custom solutions with templates being, obviously, more affordable.  Although we do very well with the customs our templates sell far more and of those there are, of course, templates that sell better than others.

We have never had any issues between websites that decide on the same templates.  Never.

Due to my practical experience with different properties using the same templates I have to say that I disagree with the assertion that the html and css (and jquery and everything else) that goes in to the template construct would be considered duplicate content.  I have always believed, and still do, that "duplicate content" refers only to the subject matter that is published on the website.  Nothing else.

I believe that you are safe with this.  So long as the delivered content, that is the content that a visitor will see/read on site, is different from site to site (not just a little different but actually different) than you should be perfectly fine.  Are you seeing issues of some sort?  What brought this about?

Just a quick look at the home page a some quick navigation of the site showed me that on the home page alone there are at least five links that go to howtotradecommoditiesDOTcom/go/etoro which just redirects to the etoro website.  It almost looks like there are ads that are disguised as internal links in order to keep from getting the 'above the fold' penalty.  Who knows how Google sees this but I would think that they wouldn't see it in a very good light whether this was the intention or not.  I would certainly look at reworking your internal linking structure as well.

Good luck

Yes - I think you saw exactly where I was going with my question

so you have domain #1 with good content and we assume some authority or trust in Google, however, you no longer need the website but you do not want to let its authority go to waste.  Then you have domain #2 witch is a website that you are going to continue to maintain and you would like to transfer as much of domain #1's authority to domain #2.

Let me ask you a question.  Are the websites for the same business or do they carry information about the same subject?

Your domain settings need to be fixed.  Right now there are effectively four versions of your home page:

aa-rentals.com

www.aa-rentals.com

aa-rentals.com/default.asp

www.aa-rentals.com**/**default.asp

also many of your links appear to be forum and comment links.  I would suggest cleaning those up and beginning a natural link building campaign.  I would guess that the last Panda update got you.

Good luck

Every page of the website links to it.  quickstart.clari.net links to that particular page.  And the rest of the site just isn't optimized (as you already stated) so I think that Google takes all of these things and for some reason decided that the resources page is the most relevant for the term.

Taking shots in the dark here... this is really odd  At least you know you will be able to correct it with no trouble at all, lol

shanrenee.com has relevant links from photography and wedding sites.

http://jmayphoto.com/index2.php#!/home does not.  Also, the URL string is funky, I don't put stock in keywords tags but this one is stuffed pretty bad - and the pages that do have content... it appears that the content is Framed...  They may have been developed by the same agency but they did not develop them in the same way at all.

Weird - I will check my settings.  I was able to send you a PM with my email though.  You should have it

Cool - had to ask, no offence.  I will watch for the PM

What is your URL?  Did you get an email from Google stating that there was a penalty or anything like that?

Tricky.  Here is my take.

Google, as I am sure you know, recommends responsive design so all 'versions' of a website operate under the same URL. https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details

However, it is very clearly stated "...serving the same HTML to all devices and using just CSS to change how the page is rendered on the device"

I read that as "Don't hide anything"  They want the SAME html being served so I take that to mean all of it - not some.

Could you compromise and make it an H2 or H3 and just set the CSS to show that particular tag as a small sub-header on the desktop version, but a bigger more prominent header on the other versions?

I don't believe that non-specific YET naturally built links will ever hurt you.  Obviously they will never help quite as much as industry specific links but the fact remains that they are not spam; they are real, honestly built relationships.  I would not spend one second worrying about those links.  I would also, however, not spend lots of energy or time building more if there are more relevant links that you could be spending your time trying to build.

I would probably do my best to dump those spammy .edu links though.  But that's just me

Cheers!

Brilliant, Marcus.  Thumbs up!  Diane, be sure to mark his answers as 'Good Answers"

Cheers!

Please keep us updated

Yeah and I guess if it was a penalty you would have received an email - Google is being all transparent now.  This is an odd situation you have.  maybe you should kill the 301 just to see if the old site shoots back up.  Weird, my friend... very weird.  I wish I could be of any assistance but I have never seen this before.  Good luck.

Is it possible that the 301s actually don't have much to do with it?  Or perhaps that doing this drew algorithmic attention to the website?  In going over your website I, like others before me, couldn't find any reason for you to get knocked back so then I ran your site (the new one) through open site explorer and it seems the majority of your links are blog comments and most of those are on blogs that are in genres unrelated to what you do.  It could just be that Google isn't giving you the credit for these links that they used to.  Just a thought.