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Aran has pretty much hit the nail on the head, the main purpose of a sitemap from a SEO point of view is to submit it to Google Webmaster tools to help Google find all of the pages on your website. Of course sitemaps are also useful from a users point of view and helps people to quickly find a page on your site. I would defiantly recommend you stick to one sitemap per domain. Regarding redirects - these should help: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/cross-domain-canonical-the-new-301-whiteboard-friday http://www.seomoz.org/blog/301-redirect-or-relcanonical-which-one-should-you-use

Same opinion as everyone else here, it is not just about webmaster tools, you should use a 301 redirect from one versionm to the other too As for whcih version to use, in my opionion it doesn't matter from an SEO standpoint which you use really, so it's down to a business decision based on what you feel is aesthetically more pleasing, or more useful to you. WITH ONE POSSIBLE EXCEPTION. If you are in the situation that you have lots and lots of quality links to either version (www or non-www) then I would tend to lean towards that version. Obviously so long as you are putting a 301 redirect (are you on a linux server by the way?) then in time the weight of the links from one version (www or non-www) should be passed to the other version, via the permanently moved header status that Google will find. Even so, to keep things running smoothly, personally, I would go for a balance between what I think looks best, and which version has the most backlinks at present. Whichever you choose, setup the 301 from the other version, to the version you go with.

Thanks Ryan!

Thanks Barry, I sorta thought that would be the case, but wasn't a 100% sure

Yes, the listing may lose the ranking if those 100 backlinks are from worthy sites.

I don't have any real case, it was just a question that I was wondering.

Thanks Alan.  That's really helpful and not something I was aware of.

Thanks a lot. It is a relief.

You want them on all pages as I'm sure Google is seeing copies of all your pages. This is really a best practices thing but I add them to all pages when the page is created to avoid just such issues. If you choose the www version you would use this tag for the Career center page: In addition I've added a link to this great post on canonical Hope this helps

Doing both covers all the bases.  I can't recall who it was that did the test (@TonyAdam on Twitter I think) but the test involved rel=canonical and 301s being implemented, and the discovery was that rel=canonical was acknowledged faster than the 301s. And at the very least, doing both won't hurt.

Thanks for the site, I also have a site that went online this year and was curious to know wich page rank I will probly have after the update

It depends on whats currently out there and how the page is being redirected. If the page is being 301 redirected from http to https then you may lose link juice if everyone is linking to the http version. For most webmasters, you only need a handful of pages to be https so I would consider that as well if that applies to you (it may not). As Alan mentions, you may run into duplication issues if the web page can be accessed by http and https.Check out this article by Search Engine Journal. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-for-http-and-https/15055/

Hi Kevin, after reading the post and watching the video I am very clear on what I should do next, I didn't even knew that GWT allows you to add sub-directories. thank you very much!

Alan is right. I'll only add that you'll really want to look through the links he provided. Local SEO is a related, but very different animal than regular SEO. Also, unless I missed an important detail, you may want to look into canonicalizing the manufacturer's site to your own site, assuming you don't care whether the manufacturer's site appears in the SERPS.

Okay, no worries

I'll definately nofollow the affiliate link right away. I'd not though about absolute position, that sounds like a great work around! Do you think thats the best way to do it?