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Google mysteriously decided to index the broken, https version of one page on my company's site (we have a cert for the site, but this page is not designed to be served over https and the CSS doesn't load). The page already has many incoming links to the http version, and it has a canonical URL with http.  I resubmitted it on http with webmaster tools.  Is there anything else I could do?

I have a Google Alert that has stopped pulling in recent results even though a web search indicates that the pages are being indexed. None of the alert settings have changed. Anyone else have this happen recently and know how to remedy this problem?

I'm trying to make another push to get authors on my site to set up authorship. Can anyone point me in the direction of any official stats from Google on the impact of authorship on SERP click-throughs? I've seen some articles on SEO sites that make it seem like the lift is anywhere from 20-40%, but those seem to be site specific cases. I'm wondering if there's any broader studies out there or official data from G. Thanks!

We've been transitioning a large site to a new CMS for the last few months and we are finally getting ready to move the homepage and high level sections. Are there any good articles or tips for this portion of our migration? URLs will be staying the same so redirects aren't needed, we're recreating all the existing metadata in the new CMS, we are rebuilding our sitemaps in the new platform, etc. I wasn't sure if there were specific things I should pay close attention to for the homepage & section fronts that are different from other pages on the site when migrating. Thanks in advance!

I was asked to take a look at a site that a friend redesigned and immediately plummeted in rankings. It was a flash site where the domain redirected to a flash landing page. When the site was redesigned, they removed the flash page and put in the new site on the domain URL without changing the redirect or putting a 301 in place on the old flash landing page URL. This site didn't have many backlinks to begin with, but it did ok for some important search phrases. Now when I look in Webmaster Tools, there are only 2 backlinks showing. Meanwhile I know there are more backlinks in existence, primarily from yellowpages and citysearch. I've had them put a 301 on the old flash landing page pointing at the domain URL and they've added a canonical URL. What have I missed here?

Currently, if you search for my site's brand name on Google, we are the top result. However, rather than having 2 columns of sitelinks, there is just one line of 4 sitelinks. When you search for the site's domain (sitename.com), you get the full 2 columns of sitelinks. Are there any strategies for getting the 2 columns on more than just the domain name search? At the very least, I'd like to get 2 columns to appear when you do a brand name search, but it'd be great to get 2 columns of sitelinks for our top search queries as well. Thanks for the advice...

I manage two sites that share some content. Currently we do not use a cross-domain canonical URL and allow both sites to be fully indexed. For business reasons, we want both sites to appear in results and need both to accumulate PR and other SEO/Social metrics. How can I manage the threat of duplicate content and still make sure business needs are met?

My site has lots of reviews: Movies, TV, Music, Restaurants, etc. I'm looking for sites that take critic reviews and link back to the critic's site. We're already on Metacritic.com and Rottentomatoes.com, which seems to be the two biggies for movies & tv. But I'm sure there are more out there. Also, I'd love to find sites for restaurant reviews (specifically in the Boston area). Are there any lists out there of sites like these? I'm NOT looking for UGC sites that allow user reviews. I'm looking for sites that accept professional critic reviews, preferably via some sort of automated feed. Thanks Mozzers!

I work on a large news site that is constantly being crawled by Google. Googlebot is hitting the homepage every 5-10 minutes. We are in the process of moving to a new CMS which has left our sitemap nonfunctional. Since we are getting crawled so often, I've met resistance from an overwhelmed development team that does not see creating sitemaps as a priority. My question is, are they right? What are some reasons that I can give to support my claim that creating an xml sitemap will improve crawl efficiency and indexing if we are already having new stories appear in Google SERPs within 10-15 minutes of publication? Is there a way to quantify what the difference would be if we added a sitemap?

Video on my site all resides at www.mydomain.com/video in a player that does not assign unique URLs for each video. We may be able to rewrite the URLs to include a unique identifier found in the video's metadata (www.mydomain.com/video/?bctid=17769780). If I did this, how would it impact the canonical URL? Do the SEs accept canonicals with query strings? What if I only changed the canonical URL and did not change the video's URL? Would that be a problem?

Option 1)      In the browser, we use javascript to determine if you meet the redirect conditions (referrer not mydomain.com and no bypassing query-string).  If so, then we direct your browser to the subdomain.mydomain.com URL.  Googlebot would presumably get the original page. Option 2)      In the browser, we use javascript to determine if you meet the redirect conditions.  If so, we trigger different CSS that hides certain components of the page and use javascript to load in extra ads.  Googlebt would get the unaltered page. In both scenarios the page content does not change. However, the presentation is different. The idea is that under certain conditions users are redirected to a page with more ads. The ads are not too severe on the redirected page and will not cause an above the fold penalty. That said, will either option be considered cloaking by Google?

Is there a site that archives Google Trends' hourly Hot Searches data? I'd like to see if specific keywords were trending at a specific time yesterday. Is this data out there? Is there a different site I should be using for this info?

A client of mine's site is currently sitename.com. www.sitename.com redirects to the non-www URL and the canonical is using the non-www URL.  This is a fairly new site and there aren't many existing inbound links. Is there a benefit to switching this?

Does Google recognize HTML5 sites using responsive design as mobile sites? I know that for mobile searches, Google promotes results on mobile sites. I'm trying to determine if my site, created in HTML5 with responsive design falls into that category. Any insights on the topic would be very helpful.

We are migrating a very large site to a new CMS and I'm trying to determine the best way to handle all the links (~15k) in our html sitemap. The developers don't see the purpose of using an html sitemap anymore and I have yet to come up with a good reason why we should migrate rather than just get rid of the sitemap since it is not very useful to users. The html sitemap was created about 6 years ago when page rank sculpting was a high priority. Currently, since we already have an XML sitemap, I'm not sure that there's really a need for a html sitemap, other than to maintain all the internal links. How valuable are the internal links found in an html sitemap? And will it be a problem if we remove these from our link profile? 15,000 links sounds significant, but they only account for less than .5% of our internal links. What do all you think?

Can someone point me to an authoritative article on the value of Reddit links? I'm trying to determine if it's something we want to put effort into doing on a regular basis. Are reddit links followed? It seems like some are and some are not.

We are currently migrating our site to a new CMS and in part of this migration I'm getting push-back from my development team regarding the HTML sitemap. We have a very large news site with 10s of thousands of pages. We currently have an HTML sitemap that greatly helps with distributing PR to article pages, but is not geared towards the user. The dev team doesn't see the benefit to recreating the HTML sitemap despite my assurance that we don't want to lose all these internal links since removing 1000s of links could have a negative impact on our Domain Authority. Should I give in and concede the HTML sitemap since we have an XML one? Or am I right that we don't want to get rid of it?

We are building comment pages for an article site that live on a separate URL from the article (I know this is not ideal, but it is necessary). Each comments page will have a summary of the article at the top. Would I be safe using the first page of comments as the canonical URL for all subsequent comment pages? Or could I get away with using the actual article page as the canonical URL for all comment pages?

One of my goals for 2012 is to network more, so I'm trying to find some SEO conferences to attend this year. Unfortunately I don't have much of a travel budget, so I'm looking for events/conferences in the Boston/New England area. I'm open to both large conferences and small local events. Are there any Boston specific groups I should join?

Generally I use the Google Keyword Tool for my keyword research, but given the fact that the data is either country specific or global, I was wondering what others use for regional/dma-specific keyword discovery. Regional traffic is very important to my site, so I'm hoping to find a tool that I can use to find keywords germane to my audience.

Anyone have tips on building links to a newspaper site? I am looking for a strategy to create links to a news site beyond building one link at a time. We have so much content that is constantly updated that it would be impossible to do this one page at a time.

I'm looking into ways to optimize a daily deals website. Any best practices or tips out there other than promoting on social sites?

I work for a news site and some of our photo galleries get indexed by Google News while others never do. I'm trying to determine why some are more successful than others even though they all follow the same guidelines regarding keyword-rich headlines & copy, h1s, etc. When comparing what's been indexed in the past with current galleries, there doesn't appear to be an obvious pattern. Can anyone share some insight into this?

Can someone point me to a list or just tell me specific search bots that use referrers?

Is infinite scrolling bad for SEO? Is there a way to implement infinite scrolling without hurting a site's SEO?

Is it better to use a PDF or hard code restaurant menus (or any document for that matter) in HTML? I want the content to be indexed and thought PDF was the way to go for several reasons, but I wanted to get confirmation on this before I move forward.

I've read blog posts stating that encoding special characters in title tags is both ok and not ok. Any definitive answer out there? Do the extra characters from adding encoding count towards the total number of characters that Google displays in SERPs? Or do they just count as one character?