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If you're the origin of the content, you should keep the credit (authority) on it as age of the content is a factor. That's why fresh content is good. When a manufacturer's new content comes out, we hustle to get the content up as quickly as possible so we reap as much benefit from "freshness" as possible. Having said that, I've seen some of our manufacturer sites well below us in the rankings largely because their SEO isn't so hot. Some manufacturer's/distributors don't put much emphasis on SEO for various reasons. If you're doing some good SEO, with your brand in your domain and originating the content, you should be in great shape.

Hi Bob, I am not 100% sure if I understood well the question, but: if you make a change to a website and Big G indexes it, you should aspect changes in the rankings in the same time. I am working on some mini-site lately, and experienced rankings from even 2-3 days after launch. So You can aspect changes soon also. At least this is my experience. I hope it helped, Cheers!

Hey Bob, I ran into a similar issue a while back where one of the sites I was working on was ranking well (top 3 positions) for the top selling product, but it was the homepage. We were happy but at the same time knew based on the competition hat we would most certainly only be able to achieve limited results with ths page as it was truly not the best result for the query. What we did was to make sure the text on the homepage covered all of the top level product categories and reworked the URL architecture to be more friendly. We create category landing pages for each or our products, i.e. http://brand.com/product-category and then linked to individual listing pages for each product from those category pages (pretty typical eCommerce architecture) This in combination with some focused anchor text link building to the category pages achieved the result we were looking for. We now rank #1 for the product term with the product category page - which also happens to be an exact match at the sub-directory level for our target search term. Best of all, our homepage now ranks in position 3 for the same term (it didnt move, but was surpassed by our product category page) This change in the architecture (both URL and content) brought about a number of beneficial trickle-down results and we are now actually ranking very highly for almost all of our product keywords at the category level. These results also reinforce that strong target anchor text on inbound links is still your friend. I hope that helps? Cheers, Nick