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Thanks Hilary - I'm concerned that if I do that, I would lose the http version as well.

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?

Thanks. I had a feeling this was the case, but I just wanted some confirmation.

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...

Does a duplicate content penalty impact specific pages or entire sites? If I wanted to test using the cross-domain canonical on a certain section of my site, would the impact be visible? Or would I need to put cross-domain canonicals on everything appearing on both sites in order to see the results?

If I used the cross-domain canonical, would that mean that one site would stop appearing in search results?

I think I decided to use the view-all page as the rel=canonical.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html

We actually didn't end up using infinite scroll. But, if I were to use it, I'd probably just create a static html page that periodically updates throughout the day and use it as the canonical URL and for internal linking purposes. I know it's not ideal, but it's a solution I've used in the past with decent results for dynamically generated pages.