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I agree with this post. Google Webmaster Tools seem to have a mind of their own. OSE it!

Your looks like a script or something. It has a bunch of links. On my end I see nothing except the nav bar and some banner ad. NOTHING in the body. I would give this a 404.

Also think of website structure for analytics. The URL structure can make it easy to get some good information about the site. Lunametrics has a great post on this at http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2010/09/22/designing-google-analytics-friendly-site/.

If you're still in contact with a web developer, that would be great. If you're not, a note to everyone else on this thread that the website in question is using IIS 6.0, so apache info isn't going to help in this case.

Search engines mostly treat sub domains as if they were their own domain. From what I understand they pass zero to no value back and forth from sub domain to main domain without linking them. So redirecting a sub domain with zero links will bring you no value. The only advantage I have heard rumor of is that a sub-domain will carry the age of the main domain... I have no experience or tests that would prove this or disprove it.

It depends on how you define "relevance". From a search engine perspective, a page's relevance is determine towards a particular keyword or phrase based on numerous factors. The given page's title is one of those factors.

All from external sites,

Keep us posted on the Traffic Bumps if you can,  I would be interested to see the outcome.

Footer links are discounted because, as Egol wrote, footer is a classical place where to put spammy "credits" links. If I was you i would make better that internal pages, for instance giving a short but needed description to the sites of your "newtwork". In fact, surely because of my ignorance about the topic, I cannot see the difference existing between many of those sites, giving to me the sensation they were created simply because you try to dominate the SERPs with exact matching domain names. More over, if you put your network links in the footer of a the sites... that can be dangerous for real, because you are practically declaring the existence of a web ring/link wheel, something that can make you sites go directly to the hell of ban.

Cheers Bryce!

Hi Dru, Looking at your page, it appears that you are using the wrong format for your rel=canonical tags. The tag I saw in your code was formatted as: where it should have the format: I think this should clear things up, but let me know if I am missed something. http://www.resnet.us/directory/auditor/az/89/home-energy-raters-hers-raters/2

Yep! So a query should look like: http://www.google.com/search?q=your+search+query&gl=uk

That certainly works from a functional perspective. Based on the original question and the avoidance of any numbers in the current URL, it seems that would be quite undesirable. Many people want to avoid all numbers in URLs as it looks quite ugly. Including the post id allows a balance between minimizing numerical use, and functionality.

If you have 301 redirects of every page in place as the new design is uploaded then the traffic that comes in through the old URLs will be moved by your server to the new URLs.  Also, search engines will follow links to the old URLs and give the new URLs most of the linkvalue. If you don't use 301s on a page then any person who clicks a link to your site on another domain or in a search engine will not see the new page.  They could see the old page if you did not remove it or an error if you removed it.