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Patrick, Thank you very much for all the pointers. This is an exhaustive list. We will take a deeper look at your response and get our hands on this this month. We did some of the things you mentioned already but we will try one by one again and share which worked and not worked. Thank you

Unfortunately, the answer is "it depends". I do have some recent experience with this for 2 very small sites (one has around 300 indexed URL, the other has around 70), which you may find useful. In each case, it took just a day or two to get the most important URLs (best rankings, traffic, link authority, etc.) swapped in for their non-https counterparts. However, deeper URLs with little link authority took up to 90 days to be swapped out. If your most important URLs don't get swapped out in a week or so, I would check these things: Make sure you've updated internal links so that they point to the https URLs. You don't want to pass your link authority through 301s anyways. Make sure all versions of the site are verified in GWT, setting the https version as the preferred version. Make sure your sitemaps (XML and HTML) contain the https versions of your URLs Make sure that the https URLs do not have the non-https URL's set as the canonical version. Hope this helps and good luck!

No it isn't.  As I said - RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301] This is saying that the condition is off - so non HTTPS URL calls then have the rewrite rule to switch to HTTPS.

Simply file a DMCA complaint and their results from SERPS will be removed. It will not help you much if you ask them to add a credit link or something else. Moreover, if there are just 2 to 3 scrapper sites then first ask them to remove your content from their sites, mostly wouldn't reply if they are earning much from that scrapped content. If they don't reply then file a DMCA complaint. I think DMCA is the best option, I've seen ever.

There are a couple of thoughts that I have regarding this question and the reference you made to Neil's post, so I will try to organize my thoughts here for you: First, unless you are the food network... recognize that you probably don't have the DA or authority that the food network has. In his post, the Food Network did not attempt to rank both of those posts for the term "cooking". Google has gained an understanding of both of those pages with a relation to the term "cooking". Some of that would have been through on-site SEO, but a large portion of that would have been through links, social signals, DA, PA, etc... It isn't simply about optimizing 2 pages for the term "cooking". If you attempt to optimize two or more pages for the exact same keyword around the same keyword, you run the risk of self-canibalization. Read/watch more here: http://moz.com/blog/keyword-targeting-density-and-cannibalization-whiteboard-friday What I would suggest is that either your website, or a category should represent the broad keyword/phrase/theme, and then let it's subcategories target other variations of that theme and how others may search it. For example, lets say I wanted to create a campaign around Rubics Cubes (I'm on a mission to solve one right now), perhaps I could create supporting pages that target supporting themes such as "how to solve a rubics cube", and "where to buy a rubics cube", or "Amazing rubics cube videos"...etc. The point is that you become a resource for Rubics Cubes, not just a page that ranks for that term. Be the end all be all for people looking for rubics cubes, and have your site hierarchically organized to help point all of those rubics cube related resources point to the main rubics cube page. Now, back to neil's point, if you created a fascinating resource for rubics cubes that developed shares, links, and buzz, it is very possible that you could gain 2 listings on the first page of google, but they have to be amazing. Hope this helps ! (I'm going to solve my rubics cube)