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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?

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?

Working on a site for a client and the CMS provider has all variants of their domain (.co.uk & .com and / and http:// etc) temp redirecting to the /default.aspx homepage. I know in theory that this means no Google Juice is being passed to the final location page, does this mean that all backlinks that point to their domain are not actually passing Juice onto the homepage? Thanks

I've been having detailed discussions with a CMS provider on behalf of a client. Long URLs are the least of their problems however, the developer is arguing that Google has amended their algorithm and will now read URLs that are up to 255 characters long. I have stated that as far as I am aware, Google will still not read URLs over 115 characters... Before I stamp my feet, can someone confirm what is actually happening? SEOmoz still classes URLs >115 characters long as an amber issue. Thanks

Hi there, I have a number of clients who have their telephone numbers on their sites (understandably of course!) and SEOmoz is classing them as links and therefore a 404 in the crawl software. The protocol is added in the code so if viewing the page on a mobile you can call the client. Should I be doing anything else? Webmaster does not pick these up as 404s so I am wondering if this is an SEOmoz bug or that I should be adding a no-follow? Thanks jT

Hi, I have a new client set-up in SEOmoz and the crawl completed this morning... I am picking up 20 x '400' errors, but the pages listed in the crawl report load fine... any ideas? example - http://www.morethansport.co.uk/products?sortDirection=descending&sortField=Title&category=women-sports clothing

If a user searches using Google.com but is based in the UK, is it classed as a Google UK search or a Google US search in terms of monthly search volumes? Most of my clients are targeting UK consumers and often rank well on Google UK but outside the top fifty for Google US. I have mentioned that that is fine unless a client happens to use google.com. Am I talking rubbish?

Yep as mentioned, I had some pages hit the top ten pretty quickly after ensuring they were A-grade for pretty uncompetitive keywords however, today, all bar 2 have just vanished from the top 50! All were ranking in Google.co.uk and I know we were predicting the Panda update to hit soon but WOW! My client is understandably a little upset, what on earch do I tell him and what should I do about it? Cheers! jT