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Makes sense. I thought there might be more to it. Thanks for the quick response.

Keep in mind that Google Index's everything that it can crawl.  Even if you put a block in the robots.txt they will probably crawl it.  You can require a password to that subdomain and keep big G out.  This is easy to do if you have a site with cpanel access.  Just go to manage permissions, and password protect that director with a .htaccess pw.

Also, some site owners will run link checking tools on their sites that look at their off-site links and see if any return 404s. If you're not returning a 404, the site owners may not know (via an automated tool) that the link is broken.

If you just want the directory page removed from SERPs, but not the images, you can put a meta noindex tag in the of the page (see here).  It'll look like .  Provided you link to the images from other pages, you should be in business. I don't think it would hurt your rankings at all.  I would exclude it as you don't want people wandering in to your site on a directory page.

I'd suggest checking that any jquery solution hides stuff with display:none after the page has loaded. Essentially is the content/menu fully visible when you turn javascript off and load the page? (regardless of how horrific the display looks?) Bear in mind that Google also advises against things like display:none for implementation of things like microformats.

I think that is not an question for a q&a Forum. Its basic SeoKnowledge http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo If your content is public(crawlable). Its important that the dynamic content ist optimized automatically. (Title, Meta Description, Html Markup, and so on)

Including but not limited to "pages which are hosted on web servers located in Australia". While hosting is an important factor Google are aware that a lot of the times webmasters might get better deals and service from host in different geographical areas. Let me put it this way. If I have a site hosted in the US, but my site is in german, my backlinks are from german sites, the local address on the site is in Germany and I have a german phone number, it si likely Google will take the hint that I'm more relevant to people in Germany.

Our site uses the "+" and is has never hurt our rankings - we've held many #1 positions in Google.  If I had to start the site all over again I'd use the dash instead but if you have pages that have been around for a while I wouldn't worry about it.

Matt Cutts on PDF... watch?v=oDzq-94lcWQ

I created a script and database that I use a regex lookup for the product id from old URIs and it will give me the new URI for that product, the script then sends a 301 with the new URL.  There are about 11,000 entries in the database.  Add to that the pages that don't have an exact match (such as extra product info pages and extra product review pages)...those are sent to the new product page since it is the closest match.  That means I probably have 301s serving for 20,000+ pages.

If pages are not been indexed you can try and add the urls to Digg.com or Stumble Upon for example. It has worked for me in the past As said above it could also be other reasons for not been added to the index, no content? robots block? Server issues? Dormant pages not internal linked to?

As far as both duplicate content issues and dynamic parameters, you may want to look into using the rel="canonical" tag instead of the noindex tag. Matt Cutts: Learn About the Canonical Link Element in 5 Minutes Google Webmaster Central: About rel="canonical" Rand Fishkin: Canonical URL Tag - The Most Important Advancement in SEO Practices Since Sitemaps

In my experience links on highly trusted sites are more valuable than links on low quality sites. I wouldn't stress too much about the number of outbound links on a page. An authoritative and editorial link on harvard.edu would be more valuable with 100 other OBL than a link on a lower trust site/page with only 10 obl. Of course this is only my opinion, many people disagree with me.