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Definitely possible. It used to be much easier. You can rank for 5 pages, all your stuff LOL. good old days Anyway, try to look at the social pages/forums, etc already ranking there where you can put your content. Those are great signals that tell you that you can create content on those and rank those pages (link to them to make the % higher) If high trust domains like what you mentioned aren't ranking there, you need to test it. And if you said that the keywords are easy enough, then your chances for those to show up is really good.

Hi there, you've received some good responses. Did any of them answer your question? We'd love an update, thanks!  (Christy)

Sorry denverish, I have been really busy lol Point number 3 refers to "pinging" your website, to let the search engines know your site has been updated. There are a few spammy ones out there, but I would try using: http://pingomatic.com/ or https://pingler.com/ Pinging is a process by which you can inform major Search Engines and RSS direcotries(Google,Bing,Yahoo,Technorati etc) that you have updated content/URL's in your blog/Website. Pinging can also help in getting website changes indexed quickly.

Tag pages can be valuable if they are unique and substantive. If your tag pages are all short like these then I would 301 them.  You also might be able to disable them in your content management system. I don't use tag pages.  Instead my blog has a homepage, post pages and hand-built category pages that are outside of the content management system.

hey burnseo - if you're still getting notifications from this thread, would you happen to recall where you ended up finding info. that google recommends placing the vary header at page level?  running into the same question myself.  if you have links you could post to where you found the answer, that'd be great.  thanks!

Interesting.  I'd never heard that before. We've never had GA or GWT on these mirror sites before, so it's hard to say what Google is doing these days. But the goal is definitely to make them and their contents invisible to SEs.   We'll get GWT on there and start removing URLs. Thanks!

By DW do you mean DreamWeaver or DemandWare? I wouldn't build an XML sitemap in Dreamweaver, and I'm sure DemandWare would have a built-in tool for this. You can go to Google and search for "Free XML Sitemap Generator" or something similar and find a few good options. I use the one from Audit My PC from time to time still, but there are many others. The one below does include images and video, but I don't know if they segment them. Worth a try: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ .

Thanks Oleg; those are some great points. I appreciate it!

Are you asking rather than having two site brandA.com & brandB.com is there a way to create brand.com and on that site display the content relevant to the visitors location? If not then I agree with EGOL

Thank you for you answer and comments. We're a little scare of putting a hurdle in front of the visitors and will monitor the impact closely, but they do get a lot of valuable information. We will still measure and compare the rate of downloads before and after the changes.

Stephen, The flatter the architecture, the more apt pagerank is to reach all the pages of your site.  However, that has to be balanced with navigation that helps visitors most easily get to where they want to go on the site, which typically runs counter to presenting them with completely flat navigation. If you think of giving visitors fastest access to the content on your site that is most important to the majority of them and then require somewhat more numerous clicks to get to less important info, you'll probably do OK.

You would use Google Webmaster tools to remove a page from Google Search index. On the Webmaster Tools home page, click the site you want. On the Dashboard, click Google Index on the left-hand menu. Click Remove URLs. Click New removal request. Type the URL of the page you want removed from search results (not the Google search results URL or cached page URL), and then click Continue. How to find the right URL. The URL is case-sensitive—use exactly the same characters and capitalization that the site uses. Click Yes, remove this page. Click Submit Request.

To throw some more info out there on this one. My guy just sent me a link (see attachment) to a Matt Cutts video where he explains that if you're doing this sort of design with normal web design practices, Google will not penalize the hidden text as spammy. We're currently using Display: None tag, which isn't mentioned specifically, but we think should be alright according to Matt's video. Any thoughts on this? Thanks! watch?v=UpK1VGJN4XY

Have these a common structure? I had the same issue some time ago, but was lucky enough to have them under fewer subdirectories, so that I could just work on them to actually inform Google about all the pages. I managed to do that using a redirect 410 (url permanently gone) in my htaccess: Redirect 410 /category/ Redirect 410 /category2/ and so on. So that every article in those categories went away. After that, I also disallowed these categories in my robots.txt. Hope it helps.

I agree with Andy - Just make sure to remove the redirect from site 1 to site 2 before making the swap. As for the sites existing rankings... who knows. All you can really do is hope for the best. Good luck

Hi Rob, The general rule of thumb is don't worry (too much) about no-follow links, although there are times to also ignore this as well. Key factors that will be making a difference, are the content and the do-follow links. You can't just look at the back-links as the reason why you aren't ranking well. Without seeing them, I would be tempted to just not worry about the no-followed links, and concentrate on: Making sure the do-follow links are of good quality and don't fall into the spammy category, and Look at your content and how good it is - does it match up to the competition? It never hurts to do some competition analysis to see how your competitors are beating you. -Andy

Not the most helpful answer, but it's the best anyone can probably give at the same time...the truth is, no-one really knows an exact answer. Some people report it taking a few weeks, some a few months; it just varies and can also be affected by algorithmic penalties too. It's important to note that with these algorithmic penalties you won't be informed about them, so if there has been any poor SEO methods used in the past then it's probably worth correcting ASAP.

I wonder why Google's PhD engineers didn't post detailed info about this?....  But, I can probably understand it better from the Moz blog. They also should have warned people that it would tank their adsense earnings.

Thanks! I'll see if this changes anything.

Many thanks, Timbronz The solution you suggested worked perfectly. The "\x" is a particularly very different insight as just escaping "%" with "" does not work. Dennis Seymor, it is finding that way to redirect was the toughest problem as just escaping does not work and this has stumped many.