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Google picks this particular feature out based on what they view as the most relevant resource for that particular content or question asked in the search bar.

There is not a way to make this display or force them to display yours as the resource.  Become the authoritative source of information and reliable source for a particular topic, and you may get displayed in this.

If you are using Wordpress as a CMS, it is possible to 301 on a page level per page.  It is a custom field if you are using certain Wordpress frameworks, or something like Yoast SEO.

You could load the 301 redirect values into the database table via phpmyadmin or similar, but if you don't know what you are doing you can screw the whole site up, so if you don't know what I am saying, don't try it this way.

BTW - that is a pretty innovative idea based on your specific business... it might show you where to market to!  Don't discount that value of that.  Maybe you could have someone stand out in a costume handing out cards at the "hot" intersections.  Just saying... you have to get creative with your marketing.

301 each page to the new page on the new re-branded URL.  Pay particular attention to the ones getting a ton of traffic (whatever a ton looks like for that specific site).  You will be better off to do that, rather than do a domain-wide 301 redirect from a number of perspectives.

Don't burn a 5 year old domain, that takes too much time and effort to just abandon it.

http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/gallery

Download their software, it is free I believe and create your map.

It will take some work, but if you don't want to outsource the work/maps, then this is it.

Bingo, yes - this is good advice!

The password protected stuff IMO won't help you SEO wise because it will likely be blocked to robots/search engines.

If it cannot be indexed, how will the search engines know it is there?

The best answer is, it depends.  What does your analytics tell you where the traffic is coming from and going to on the sites?

Hmm...  got to think about that one.  What happens if someone grabs your RSS feed and puts it into their feedburner or some other feed stream - is that duplicate content too?

Have you had negative experiences with multiple RSS feeds out there from one site?

Why not use both at the same time?

That makes sense. In that case, I would analyze the competition level for your "money" keywords and topics and see if it makes sense to split them up.  You would also need to think about if there is enough content to write about,  and constantly feed for the highly localized kind of site.

It has been my experience that an entire site whose content is wholly focused on one topic will rank better generally speaking than a larger site with a broader base of topics (for that keyword and topic).  This is good and bad because you will only be able to use the 1 site for about 1 topic.

The competition level will play a large factor in the decision IMO.  That would be the next thing I would look at.

Generally, the main search engine is taking those out of the SERPS.

I have seen the same out in the wild.

Yep, Bingo.

In a lot of respects, it measure the efficiency of your site.  How well the code is optimized as well as your server in processing that code.  It is possible to have a poorly coded site which performs OK because you compensate for the bad code/bad layout by having more horsepower.  The server is definitely correlated to the pagespeed rank.  It's likened to a big differential equation with 100 factors all playing a role in the final output, but several of the items contributing to the majority of the output behavior.

Check out some of the documentation on it: https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/about

The raw horsepower of the server is only going to get you so far.  You would be much better off designing a system with a small server which is super efficient, than spend tons of money on the top of the line server which is using all of its power to process inefficient code, assets, etc.

IMO, one site is enough to manage all by itself.

Having multiple sites, just from an administration perspective is very challenging in particular when you go over a certain amount.  You would have to have full time admins just to manage the sites, let alone the content of each site.

You would have to add up how much expense you have per unit of site versus how much net revenue (profit) you have directly from that site.  I think in a lot of cases the expenses per site are going to exceed the profits, but before making a sweeping generalization, do a study and make your best guesses before investing in the infrastructure, IT and employees.

I think this white board Friday may help you out a little

http://moz.com/blog/how-google-knows-what-sites-you-control-and-why-it-matters-whiteboard-friday

I would just start creating fresh content on the old site and wait for natural organic links to grow.  The traffic will come back over time.

The best way to answer this is to test out both ways and track leads, conversions, etc from each group.  I would have at least 1000 samples from each group if possible and then compute some statistics on it for statistical significance.  Then, I would let the market tell me via conversions and leads as quantified by the statistics which one is better.

Every industry and niche is slightly different because you are dealing with a different type of customer.  What works for a Pilates blog might not work for your type of customer.

Don't guess.  Make a controlled test, quantify it then make the decision when the data is in.  You will know what to do in short order.  You could also use tools like CrazyEgg which track clicks on page, etc which may be helpful.

The canonical tag is about telling the search engines what page you want displayed as the authoritative page in a situation where you have possibly tons of duplicated content.

The canonical tag does not control how many items get displayed on your site.  So, you should find the most relevant page for a certain item or class of items, and use the canonical tag for that page thus telling the search engines, "hey I have tons of duplicate content, but here is the page which makes the most sense to put into the search engine."  Among other things, if you don't use the canonical tag in a duplicate content situation, the search engines will then pick which page they think is most relevant to rank and push the other pages down.  The page that is picked may or may not be the one you would like to rank.

Hope that helps

Check your backlink profile - are there unnatural links?  Are there sites which are spammy linking to you?

Get your site all working technically speaking, which it sounds like you have and then or at the same time check the links.  I suspect you have some bad links which you are going to have to try to remove, or disavow.

Best of luck!

1. You are correct, generally, Google will index when it makes sense for them to do so per their algorithms.  It is not in my experience driven by the time on the XML sitemap.  It could be loosely correlated, but not huge.

2. You should setup up 301 redirects on the auctions that have ended.  Don't 404 them, that is bad.  Redirect them to a page for new related auctions (probably will require some code to be whipped up).

3. You could try to utilize webmaster tools Fetch as Google to get the pages indexed, however, this is manual, not guaranteed that Google will index it and you only have so many requests available.

4. Spend some more time on getting organic links via articles and other content in the niche.  This will help on a number of levels not only in ranking but also attracting traffic from people interested in the product/market.

Thanks for the input!

We are probably going to just run 2 different sites rather than the redirect because it probably makes more sense as we get different kinds of clients from each sub-domain.  But, we wanted to know should we ever have to or need to redirect in the future.

Thank you again!