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Yannick is correct. Bing for example will lose trust in your site and start to ignore your tags if you are not honest. Bing has also stated that a canonical is much like a 301, only it leaves the useer on the page, it does not redirect. So yes it will leak a bit of link juice. Read the link yannick supplied, it explains it all.

Thanks guy, lots of what you say make great sense and has given me lots to think about and research further. Much appreciated.

Hello, It is definately a bad idea. It is simply because google can not detect that your page is not present due to your supply shortage, it yust sees that page is present sometimes and sometimes it is gone. Now ask yourslef: would you refer somebody to your friend who sometimes does the work that he is asked to do and sometimes he just quites in the middle. I think you should rather refer one who is always there and can be trusted. The same with webpages. No matter how good your page is is it unavailable for shorter and longer periods on a regular basis than it is not trustworthy. You should rather simply wite to the product that it is out of stock. Not to mention that it is much easier to solve this in your cms.

Maybe you could show your client this http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=Vacation%20in%20Greece&geo=US&cmpt=q Which shows, although you get more traffic in summer there is still search traffic for the rest of the year for the pages they are taking down. This is an incentive for them to keep those pages up and for you to maintain your SEO plans. Just an idea to try win them round to keeping the pages up.

Looks like no one has an answer to this question. It is probably too early to assess the impact of Google Plus on SEO.

Hi Miriam Thanks for your thoughts,  its much appreciated. Unfortunately Places does limit me in this instance, so you're right that other avenues of traffic generation would be a good route to head down. All the best

I wrote about this topic a bunch here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/white-hat-seo-it-fing-works-12421 but basically, I ask myself a number of questions: What are my goals in web marketing? Is it purely to make the most money possible? Am I trying to build something bigger than myself? Something that will make people happy? Something that can last even if I'm not around? Do I want to prioritize the short term or the long term? Can I afford to make more revenue, get more traffic in the next 6 months, if it means the 5 years after that might suffer? Do I want to work on building a brand and a company and a product or just a website that gets traffic? How much stock do I put in Google's webspam team vs. my ability to outthink them? Do I have the mental discipline to withstand the nervousness, doubt and fear that comes with spamming/manipulation the engines? Do I think that spam and low quality sites can convert at the same rate as a high quality brand? If not, does the delta make spamming non-viable, even if my only goal is revenue? The answers to those questions for me are clear, and they're what's led me to always pick white hat for the projects I do. Hope that helps!

Prob not a good idea to post client URLs.

No, that is not a problem and not very important for SEO that you have "clean" looking text in a text browser. A few months ago I thought I had to optimize (and by optimize I mean make it look pretty) for a text only browser as well.  However, after conducting some competitive research I found that some of our top competitors (ranked #1-5) were in far worse condition from a text only browser stand point. In a nut shell, as long as you have the text visible then you are good to go. TIP: To see how Google views your website type the following in the search bar~> cache:www.yourwebsite.com then click on "text-only version"

Is it possible that those subcategory pages were pulling in a lot of traffic.  Now that they are gone you are not getting traffic from their keywords? That is a guess.  If you want more information you will need to get traffic data from before and after for comparison.  That will tell you if you lost keywords entirely or if traffic for specific keywords fell.

Thanks for all of the advice everyone - very helpful, really appreciate it.  We're looking into this stuff now. Jason

If you forward it then the "Keyword Match" benefit is negated. Creating a landing page that promotes the specific product with links to your main domain is a current tactic used by many. You must make sure it is not a "thin content" site or duplicate to your main domain or this will negate the benefits as well. Personally I do not necessarily suggest this tactic as it is becoming less and less effective and will continue to do so. But as i said it is definitely is a tactic employed by many and if done correctly can generat sales, but I would not look at this as a longterm silver bullet... w00t!

When I search Google.com for "Career Change" I see your home page as the # 9 result. I would share if you change your title to "Career Change" it would be better for ranking purposes. This change alone may or many not make an immediate difference, but once your ranking stabilizes and you are sure no other factors are an influence you may wish to experiment. The only reason to add other words to the title is if you felt it would help your Click Through Rate. Generally speaking I try to rank as high as possible first, then adjust for CTR. I would therefore remove the "Can we Help You" from your title.