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Thanks Kent for your help before - yeah probably just coincidence - we had managed to remove some bad neighbourhood links and rewritten our content before we realised the currency display issue and changed that

google directories don't exist anymore. this question was asked before google killed their directory.

Ron, When you are performing an activity like this for your website, ask yourself "how do readers benefit from my actions?". If you are struggling to find an answer, then you probably should consider trying another activity. As Storwell suggested, natural links between your sites that help users find information are always a good thing. Google will recognize your sites are hosted together and you wont receive much, if any, actual benefit with respect to having your results rank higher. Directory links are a poor use of time and effort. If you spend that same amount of time writing one great article, you will receive better results. Figure out who the best past band was who played at one of your venues and write a great article about their visit. Include pictures, videos of their session at your place (if it's not a copyright violation), etc. Make the article something that all their fans would want to read. Readers should get the feeling "wow, I missed out on a great show! I wish I was there and I'll make it the next time they play there". Ideally that same band will be scheduled again and you can provide a link to a page that has their next appearance dates and info. You need to generate content others WANT to read. Content that people want to tell their friends about and link to. The payoff for a fantastic article that is well promoted will be more quality links then the rest of your efforts.

Have you read Google's blog post about high-quality content and sites? http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html

Those are the top three for any website. You might consider joeant.com or a few of the other high-ranking directories. Also added the BBB to the list, thanks to this article.

Regular updating of your feed. Even if nothing's changed, regularly resubmitting, and not letting your feed expire seems to help. Using as many of the data fields as you can - giving customers the most accurate, up-to-date information possible gets rewarded by Google. Ensuring the feed you submit is without errors. Getting good site reviews seems to help too (and if nothing else should increase CTR). Finally, a good 'history' of accurate data, error-free feeds etc. - the longer you've been doing things the 'right' way, the more trust Google seems to put into your product feed

The biggest benefit you'll see with the implementation of micro formats is an increase in CTR. As for a rankings boost, there isn't anything solid to support it, but it is very possible that search engines already use this as a ranking factor. I believe Rand has indicated that micro formats could be used as a "brand signal" and Best Buy indicated significant rankings improvement after that implemented GoodRelations markup (ecommerce RDFa).

Hi Ryan Thanks for those useful comments & alternative ideas. I think we'll stick with the original idea & use the 301 approach rather than remove the listing if possible so the link juice can be directed to the client site. Cheers

Very information reply as always EGOL. Any rough estimates on how long for the full link's effects to be in place? 4 weeks?

Google Trends is really handy for this. You can check what the "Hot Searches" are right now and find one that is related to your vertical. As others have said, Twitter is great for this as well.

Whenever Matt Cutts discusses this subject in the Webmaster Tools videos and elsewhere, there is always a caveat along the lines of "while google mostly take notice of noindex and robots.txt, this may not always be acted upon". The primary reason given for this seems to be if content is indexed via a link from another site, or exists in google cache. In these cases it seems logical that it may continue to appear in the index. Your question reminded me of Dr Pete's Catastrophic Canonicalization Experiment - it seems his method proved quite effective

Thanks for the clarification Andy.

Yes, a good one. And simple

I understand, we can format the pages on the blog as we want. That is the answer that I was looking for.  Thanks!