I really wonder what google has up there sleeves now. I'm honestly fedup of trying to keep my head above water with google. I've started a new project all together now and rid myself of the domain that had the word review in it.. well hope this one gets better ranking (Free Power) as I will let the bots do the work for once. Sometimes I really feel I should give up Internet Marketing and get a regular job but it feels so good to see your site Ranked #1 its like seeing your child graduate lol Message Edited by NicoleD on 11-23-2009 11:35 AM

Carol,   Biggest thing to do would be to build backlinks to your sites.  For instance set up an HTML signature on this board and that will help your process.  Most sites need 500-1000 good links to be on the first page of Google, in addition to the normal on site optimization that most people are talking about here.

Hello!  Personally, I would continue to use both of them if they're already there.  Just make sure you put some effort into your metatag process.  It should be relatively easy to maintain two sites (I've got over 20) just don't let it backup over time and you should keep your head above water.    Some good tactics are to link all of your social networking sites/blogs from your websites too (if you don't have myspace, facebook, twitter, etc) get them and keep up with them.  It just takes a  few minutes a day for each.  This will drive traffic to your sites as well.   Don't forget your google adsense and any trustworthy affiliate links (keep to just a few)  Extra money is extra money!

Hi Carol, These forums provide a lot of useful info but your question is very specialized. First be sure to check with the Google forums. This link will take you directly to your answer. This will tell you exactly what to do. Google is now 80+% of searches, so I would consider them first. I would recommend you ALWAYS check the Google forums. They're moderated by Google employees and usually if you have a very specific question like this, they'll give you a very specific answers that get you out of the sand box faster. Second to that would be the SEO Chat forums. They're likely the most popular and you can get some very direct answers. My site is 7200 pages and I come up on the first page of almost every search worldwide with phrase from wooden transport crates to PPP-B-601 (which probably means nothing to most people :-) ). These two sites have been the source of most all my SEO education and the SEO Chat site in general has great tools that can bring in some good traffic. Even on the SEO Chat forum there are a lot of very knowledgable people who make common mistakes (like the point that domains that are less than one year old are of lesser value - this is commonly believed, but not true). While on the subject (I do get a bit chatty sometimes), if you take a look at my site linked below, you'll see that all of the <h1> tags match my page Title and the <h2> tags match my Match my meta Description. Both tags are prominent on the page and not used anywhere else in the page. I'm bringing this up here because in most cases this will cause Google to index your pages faster and higher, and this point is very difficult to find information about. Assuming you didn't do this with the old site, I would maybe drop some of the new format ideas and test this on at least a page or two. Good luck! Post back on how it goes after a couple of months. Message Edited by ChristineL on 11-11-2009 11:28 AM

Instead of worrying about link's and rankings - why not focus on the domain that will provide you the biggest bang. Thus, you can focus on the best site and if that is not the one with the good ranking - work to make sure that it builds it rank. Redircts are OK - just as long as you let search engines know that it is a redirect.

I have to echo what's already been said here as we have done analysis across MANY sites and domain age seems to be playing a major factor in rankings - at least on Google. Whether or not that will still be true after the new algorithm updates is obviously an unknown at this time.

Hi Carl,   Age of the domian does play a pretty big role I have found with SEO, especially with Google, but it is not everything.   It all depends on how much SEO you put into that 1st domain really. If it has a substantial amount of links and pages are ranking in the search engines then maybe you should keep using that one.   Or since it has age and some SEO then you could sell it and reinvest the money into your new site, because you can usually get a good price for a three year old domain (not heaps though)   Cheers

 In addition to the seo value of aged sites (and to a lesser degree domains paid more than 1 year in advance) the keyword content of a domain can add some value for narrowly focused subjects.  If you don't expect your site to become a household word or to get a lot of type in traffic, the keyword content value may be significant.    You might read some of the literature by site flipping experts, regarding how to pump up the value of a site/domain before putting it on the market.

OK this is very interesting.. I've gotten a domain that's 5 years old just by thinking up a domain name. however i've noticed that on some reviews that Google has slapped review sites so don't know if the age of the domain matters once it has the word review in the domain name. I've been noticing some difficulty in getting this site ranked. But to contribute to the topic I would sell the old domain and re-invest the $$ into the new domain. Well like what someone said here.   SEO is key in everything and good quality relevant backlinks always wins the game 

I would think that the term 'review' in your domain name would be the kiss-of-death with Google. It's likely one of the few things that they have that indicates the content is time sensitive. It may be the same as a news site where old news in no news.