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Right on. Whenever you make big changes to the structure of your site (or in the case, completely taking your site down), you can choose to submit a new sitemap to Google. This is more or less a "heads-up" to Google that things have changed on your site and to recrawl/index it when available. It does not mean that Google will go ahead and crawl/index things right away, more of a "friendly reminder". Your 301 redirects will immediately work if someone sees your old site in the SERPs and clicks on it, so you will be safe there. Once Google recrawls your site, it will see the 301 and take note that it is a permanent redirect and slowly remove your old site from the SERPs. You definitely can submit a sitemap listing all of the URLs that now have 301 redirects, omitting any of the URLs that are now "broken" or you are not 301-ing to the new site (if that makes sense). Hope this helps. Mike

Yeah, I actually requested that the canonical tag be added into the editable fields area when creating a page. Works like a charm — except when you're trying to add canonicals for /content/. Because it's automatically added in the CMS, I error when trying to create a canonical stack for: mainsite.org mainsite.org/content mainsite.org/Content mainsite.org/content/index mainsite.org/Content/index Your suggestion is definitely worth floating to the developers, though...thanks!

Hello Taylor, You are correct that there are risks in this strategy, however I think they are mostly mitigated if you use the cross-domain rel canonical tag (i.e. a rel canonical tag with an absolute path pointing to the "homebase" page). You will also be keeping those subdomains from ranking if you use this tag, so if the goal is to have a landing page for organic search traffic optimized for each region then a rel canonical tag probably isn't the best option, as the only page to rank will be the homebase page, or whichever you say is the canonical version. Make sense? Please let me know if you need further assistance with this question.