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thanks everyone, very helpful indeed!

301 redirecting an old, no longer existing page to the homepage or any other page (I'd suggest using the closest matching existing page) is certainly not a violation of google's guidelines.

Thanks for the report back. It's always helpful to have data points about how long it takes for this type of thing to come through.

A month later, I did a search for nybox on Google, and I'm seeing the sitelinks in English. Did you figure out what caused the Chinese and did you do something to fix it, or did it just happen to fix iteself?

I'm going to have to hold off on this google have done an update today which is why we've now dropped from p4 to p14. I've posted a message here http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=76830633df82fd8e&hl=en&start=1360

anyone else?

HI Adam I like the idea of the showing related content on that page, that would be useful for the user as well as increase the speed of indexing I would guess Thank you

Hi Steve, thanks for your advice! Yes, one reason for masking is URL vanity. The other one is to increase CTR.

Recently we had the same situation which was resolved nicely with rel canonical alone.

I recommend you do precisely nothing. Leave the link as it is and in fact you should have it present on all pages (or as the case is usually in the footer) if it is meaningful to your users. Privacy policy tells Google something more about your site and it does represent an extra hint (e.g. blogs usually don't have one). Canonicalising your privacy policy page to itself will do exactly that - tell Google that that's the correct canonical version of it and it would be useful only if you have various different URL versions of that same page. Privacy policy page has PR4 because PR5 links to it - it's how it usually turns out (one down each link distance away). Also there is no such thing as "domain PageRank", PageRank is calculated for each individual page - with home page usually being strongest. Given that your privacy policy does come up on the 2nd page could be due to URL length which plays role in sorting with site: command not necessarily the PageRank alone. If this page was the first page that comes up when you do site: command I would look at twice at your link structure. As it is it doesn't sound like you have any problems of that kind.

If the can't 301 all the pages, then your DNS solution would work as long as you have the same pages on your version of the site. The spiders would think it's still the same subdomain and you shouldn't lose any juice.

The domain authority of all these featured sites is very high, I would think that may have something to do with it as it can't be down to content feature as the guardian post reads more like a tweet. Anyone else have any luck gaining this kind of exposure?

Thanks! If we did that, would it be best then to change some/most of the links to the home page, or will that tank our chances of getting the indented listing?

Yeh, that would do it if all the pages had tags saying the homepage was the canonical url! Apparently I either didn't notice them, or you had already deleted them when I looked at your page.

Thanks for the follow up. I do remember reading about page rank sculpting and that change. Good stuff! I appreciate the replies Adam.