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Hey Jarrod,

I'm afraid there isn't anything you can actually do to tell Google you are the original author of your content, other than the tips Remus mentioned.

However, there is a service that you can use to help you identify sites that are duplicating your content.  It's called Copysentry and it automatically scans the web to check for content duplication. You could use this, in conjunction with DMCA take down requests (as mentioned in Remus's post) to help to defend against this in future.

Yes this is fine, from Google:

Whether you list all URLs in a single Sitemap or in multiple Sitemaps (in the same directory of different directories) is simply based on what's easiest for you to maintain. We treat the URLs equally for each of these methods of organization. More info can be found here multiple sitemaps in same directory 

Ahh yes, <lastmod>.  How did I forget this, I'm usually such a stickler on sitemaps.   Do you have any further info on 2% tolerance Alan, or is that just your personal findings? </lastmod>

Hi Tresspass,

Before thinking about using subfolders and sub domains you should think about using the county top level domains (TLDs) you already have, as country specific TLDs are (generally) a much favored way to Geo target websites.

Trespass.com for US

Trespass.co.uk for UK

However this could become a stumbling block if you wanted one that isn't available. such http://www.trespass.de/

Here is a great post on International and Multilingual sites  and here is another one The Ultimate Guide to Multilingual and Multiregional SEO

Hey Dan,

If you are correctly using rel="alternate" hreflang= meta tags or sitemaps, then it shouldn't matter if you have mostly similar content. One of Google's examples is just like your question:

Your pages have broadly similar content within a single language, but the content has small regional variations. For example, you might have English-language content targeted at readers in the US, GB, and Ireland. Now, your question on IP sniffing is a slightly different kettle of fish. Google contradict themselves in their own guidlines!

On this page, Multi-regional and multilingual sites, they say:

Avoid automatic redirection based on the user’s perceived language. These redirections could prevent users (and search engines) from viewing all the versions of your site. Yet here, Introducing "x-default hreflang" for international landing pages, they say:

The homepages of multinational and multilingual websites are sometimes configured to point visitors to localized pages, either via redirects or by changing the content to reflect the user’s language. And then there is this recent video from Matt Cutts: Is redirecting users based on their location spam?

it should be added to the end of your robots.txt and be proceeded by 'Sitemap', like:

Sitemap: http://www.exmaple.com/sitemap1.xml
Sitemap: http://www.exmaple.com/sitemap2.xml

If that's the case, then yes I would also go with folders as they are my preferred way to do it.

I've had a couple of Trespass jackets in my time!

Hey,

It's a little difficult to understand your question.

To clarify, are you asking why there is no link from your navigation menu to the high5store.com/c/BollywoodSarees page?

Hey Gary,

Back in the day when when I wanted Google to notice links I had built I used to ping them and it seemed to work.

Matt Cutts also touches on pinging services such as PubSubHubbub in this video where he is talking about getting Google to notice pages faster: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LsB19wTt0Q#t=77 I used to use https://pingler.com/ and  http://pingomatic.com/.

Also in that vid Matt talks about links on places such as Twitter. You could perhaps build links to these pages elsewhere, but weather they would get crawled any faster depends on the site I guess.

You could also submit the URL to Google. I don't know weather it would speed crawling up, worth a go though.

Just to add, you don't need a page to physically exist to add a 301 redirect Kristin, so you can set the redirects from these old pages fine.