Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks for the helpful responses and yes Ben we are based in old Jersey...

We rebuilt a site about a year ago on a new platform however Google is still indexing URL's from the old site that  we have no control over. We had hoped that time would have 'cleaned' these out but they are still being flagged in HTML improvements in GWT. Is there anything we can do to effect these 'external' dropping out of the indexing given that they are still being picked up after a year.

I have seen some mixed comment as the whether a sub-domain would benefit from the authority built up by its domain... but does a domain benefit from a sub-domain?

I have traditionally used hyphens (-) and vertical bars (|) to separate out keywords/brands in title tags. A client has asked if other characters will work such as tilde (~), apersat (@), forward slash (/) etc. Are there any special characters we should steer clear of?

We have been lucky to have some great coverage and resultant backlinks on some very high domain authority news sites such as The Times in the UK. Now that a lot of their content (including our articles and backlinks) is now gated because they are a subscription based, does:

Google site attribute the same domain authority to the subscription sites?

Does Google site crawl this content?

Does the same Google Juice flow once the site is gated?

Is the value of 'paid for content sites' eroded?

We are working with a new client that works across a number of jurisdictions. Currently they have a number of micro-sites. Each is domained under a relevant domain i.e. .hk for Hong Kong, .ru Russia etc. There is a push to absorb these into their main .com site to make it easier to manage.

Given that they want to build a local presence in these areas (including having offices there) and that these site are translated into the local language, what are the SEO implications of such a move?

Okay, thanks, and you are quite right, a whole morning is more than enough energy... gotta love SEO work!!!!

That's the strange thing, all urls on the .co.uk are 301'ing to the new site.

Webmaster is picking up 494 pages returning a 404 and yet Roger Bot is finding none, so I can't even identify where the links are coming from. This is the part that is confusing me.

If I try and access any of the pages reported in the list,  I am simply re-directed to the new site, as we are re-directing all .co.uk pages to the .com

We recently (three months now!) switched over a site from .co.uk to .com and all old urls are re-directing to the new site.

However, Google Webmaster tools is flagging up hundreds of 404s from the old site and yet doesn't report where the links were found, i.e. in the 'Linked From' tab there is no data and the old links are not in the sitemap.

SEOmoz crawls do not report any 404s.

Any ideas?

Problem solved, well, more like diagnosed!

Although the pages were A grade optimised, filters on the page (i.e. sort by high price, low price, new products) were seen as duplicate pages as the CMS would take the static page and add some dynamic content for the filter. Rel Canonical has sorted it, but we shall see next time Google updates.

Okay, thanks, and you are quite right, a whole morning is more than enough energy... gotta love SEO work!!!!

Fantastic, thanks, Cyrus and Tampa, prevented many more hours of scratching head!!!