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Thanks I appreciate the response. I'm definitely looking at as a long term strategy to build authority. Do you see any downside to submitting to all three sites? Obviously creating duplicate content but seems to me it should fall into the same category as video sites where the dup content doesn't really hurt you. I don't know if that is the case so would like to hear from those that have more experience submitting to the document sharing sites. If there are issues with dup content is it best to pick one site and build up a channel or mix up your submissions across all three. Thanks

I actually find NOINDEX, FOLLOW a bit easier to implement and very effective in most cases. If you use rel-canonical, Google would prefer that you canonical to a "View All" version of the page (not to page 1 of search results). Practically, though, either will work. I've also had decent luck with rel=prev/next, although implementation is very tricky. One other problem is that Bing doesn't honor it. This subject can get very tricky, and no one (even Google's own reps) seem to have the one "right" answer. I find, in practice, that it depends a lot on the site and scope. Adam Audette has an article that shows just how complex pagination can get: http://searchengineland.com/five-step-strategy-for-solving-seo-pagination-problems-95494

I just did this for my site (strikemodels.com). We bought bderc.com and did a 301 redirect over to the appropriate pages of Strike Models. If I go into OSE and look for only links with a 301, I see a bunch of links from bderc.com. I need to put bderc.com into OSE and to see who is linking to bderc instead of me. So if you do this for onemainfinancial, you're going to see a ton of 301 from citibank -- not sure if you were wanting that, or those who were linking to citibank before it was 301'd.

Just make sure that when/if you copy over the staging site to the live domain that you don't copy over the robots.txt, htaccess, or whatever means you use to block that site from being indexed and thus have your shiny new site be blocked.

Thanks John for the suggestion. Unfortunately the https pages aren't separate pages from the http version; one is secure and one isn't but the actual code is identical. The rel canonical tag would appear on both the http and https version. Are you sure Google wouldn't have any issues with the http pages having a rel canonical tag that points to itself?