Jessica,

I took a quick  peek at your site and my reply isn't directly about your articles. I think you should  focus your initial SEO efforts developing your business' distinct, core concepts of brand and details of how you want to get that message out. Also focus on your local SEO.  I think time spent on those things first will make the time you spend on the rest of your content more valuable and more effective.

Hi Premio,

Typically, your pagerank won't change as a result of on-page SEO.  Increases in pagerank are  typically due to back links and other offsite factors and changes in PR due to those factors may take many months to impact your tool bar pagerank.  But don't focus or Pagerank--focus on creating content and on reaching out to your audience with content that is shareable and helps them make their buying decisions.

Think of the gazillion Wordpress sites out there--they're all the same architecture and they can rank.  Your tactic used to be more prevalent, back when linking between sites (you won't be doing that, will you?) with thin content (they won't have that, will they?) helped lift all of them in the rankings.

While there are plenty of examples of multiple sites owned by the same company showing up in  the same page-one search results, there are as many, or more, examples of them all showing up at the bottom of the results.  It seems to me that if you're asking the question you're asking --at this point in the project, you may not be well enough informed to keep yourself out of the later group. I'd kindly recommend doing some additional homework before you launch.

In that case, it certainly can change over night but usually, with a new page or a page with that doesn't get much traffic it can take a month or more.  It is often the case that the home page will be re-indexed more often than other, less trafficked pages on your site, so don't expect that when you see one page updated in the results that the other ones are right behind it.

Matt,

The duplication of template won't hurt you at all. It would be worthwhile to vary the images, though.

As for the linking between subdomains , If the content is good and unique on both sites, link between them in a manner  that is appropriate for the user and the subject matter. I wouldn't link between directories from the footer if you already have navigation that has links to those directories.

That's why tagging came into vogue but too often, it's overdone.

Freshness of a page isn't necessary on all counts, as a page may maintain high rankings in spite of not having been updated for years. For many, if not most website owners, freshness is not going to keep them out of the rankings.

Moving forward though, with social and authorship playing a larger role in rankings, more of your competitors will be finding that effective use of those channels will help lift the authority of their domain, giving them a ranking advantage over you if you're not networking and publishing as well.  I think for most website owners, having active social profiles attached to your domain will be worth paying more attention to than the freshness of their content.

I think you should consider how successfully you can fold-in the old domain (name)  into the brand you want to create. Domain names as anchor text isn't that big of a think anymore--looking forward, the brand is more important thing.  If you think you might look back in a year or two and say "this domain name is just not working for us as part of our brand message" I'd go with the new domain.

Jess,

There are a number of processes that need to take place in your move and the time frame you mention allows for all of them to take place and still not see results yet.  Perhaps you could list the steps you've taken so far so we can see if you might have missed anything. If not, here are a couple of resources for you review what needs to be done.

• Moving your site - Webmaster Tools Help
• Redirection - SEO Best Practices - Moz

I'd say that your idea is a good one strategically but it's not going to be quick and easy.

If it were me, I'd start not by revising anything on-page, but by working on building links back to your home page from content relating closely to "merchant services" and with anchor text that's somewhat thematically relevant to that. Once you've build up your domain and page authority to be somewhat equal to other sites that are ranking for your term, then you might revise your home page meta tags and content to take advantage of the new strength.  The reason I say I would go in that direction is because your home page likely isn't currently strong enough to rank for the new keyword (just by virtue of on-page changes) and it may not be strong enough to pass the strength that the internal "offshore merchant accounts" landing page would need to take up the slack created by the home page not ranking for that term any more.

The better the quality and relevance of the links to your homepage, the quicker the transition will take place in the search results once you make your on-page changes. Right now, your link profile is not terribly strong.

And when you're ready to make your on-page changes:

1. Go through your site and make sure all links with anchor text of "offshore merchant accounts" are revised to point to the internal page that deals with your offshore merchant account service.
2. Make sure that links pointing to your home page carry the anchor  text "merchant services" or variations of that.
3. Anchor text from your external links going to your homepage looks generally OK but where possible, you should work on making them variations and synonyms of "merchant services", rather than "offshore merchant accounts"

Beytznet,

You may want to try this wordpress plugin to do you redirects.  If you haven't already read it, here's Moz's best practices for redirection.  And on this page is a link to a tool that can generate redirects for you.

Well Howard, it's very true that there are many blackhat techniques that work.  The reason they're called blackhat is that they go against search engine guidelines and thus are risky, short-term strategies.  People aren't going to be arrested and thrown in jail for using them (typically) so everyone does have an opportunity to join in that fray.  If you're not up for techniques that may leave you high and dry when you wake up tomorrow morning, or that don't add long term value to a commercial domain, it may just be enough satisfaction for you to know that people employing techniques like those you're describing are often the ones screaming the loudest in forums about how they got scerwed by Google and how much money they lost when Google updates their algorithm.

Calvin,

If the content on the page  with the backlink is relevant to the content on the page it is linking to, that's good. If the anchor text on that link is also relevant, that's even better.

If content on the page that the backlink is pointing to is not of a relevant or complimentary subject, google will weigh the value of that  link less.

If you change the URL of a page that is being linked to from another site and do not properly redirect the old URL to the new URL, the link will not benefit the new URL at  all.