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A side note first.  Something to consider on transient content for job listings like this that I have used on job sites I have worked on and worked pretty well - The unavailable after meta tag http://searchengineland.com/more-info-on-googles-unavailable-after-meta-tag-new-x-robots-tag-in-header-support-11714 http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-seo-advice-unavailable-e-commerce-products-186882 "The “unavailable_after” Meta tag will allow you to tell Google that a page should expire from the search results at a specific time. " This way your pages would be removed from the index on the date you list and if you have also removed the links from your sitemap etc, Google may not need to crawl them and find the 404 and/or soft404 to begin with. The soft 404 (according to Google) means your server is not showing a 404 server response for the HTML snapshot version.  I would try fetch as Google on those pages to see what Google is seeing and that may help you diagnose the situation.  I may be that your server is giving a different response than the 404 and Google is questioning it.

I have the same problem, sometimes i optimize the metadescription to increase my CTR but google doesn´t want to show it.. grr

Thanks guys. I feel quite confident that i have implemented the sitemap correctly (kinda wish i had done it through metas in the head now though as I think it might get indexed quicker this way)! It a relief that you both say this could take a couple if months the index correctly and yes I will be doing some promotion for it

Hi Matt, I recommend you read this recent post from Mike Blumenthal at LocalU: http://localu.org/blog/merge-google-pages-usually-cant-now/

If you can do a 301 you should be able to do a 404

Hi Matt, Unless I'm misunderstanding you, that sounds like a pretty successful implementation to me - it makes total sense to me that Google would temporarily de-index your site if it was returning a 503; after all, there was nowhere for a user to go. The fact that you've been able to gain back your rankings afterward means that Google understood what was going on and didn't ding you for having a "broken" site, which is what the goal of this process should be. Perhaps I'm not understanding your goals? If you want the holding/home page to stay indexed, then yes, a 200 response code is what that page should be returning - Google tries not to send traffic to pages consistently returning a 503. In your original question it sounded like you wanted to let Google know that the site was down for maintenance, but would return, in which case a 503 is really your best bet.

I've cracked it with the following: <filesmatch "="" is-finance-in-the-uk-too-london-centric="" $"=""></filesmatch> Header set Link "<http://frugal-father.com/>; rel="canonical"" <filesmatch "="" charity-skydiving-at-a-uk-parachute-centre="" $"=""></filesmatch> Header set Link "<http://frugal-father.com/>; rel="canonical"" I can now add as many files matches and header sets as I like within the IfModule, and the canonical tags appear in the HTTP header. For anyone else reading this, it may need tweaking depending on which version of Apache you're using. i.e. 'FilesMatch' and 'Head set Link' could be 'Files' or 'Header add Link'.

I would let those domains expire and buy beer with the savings.   Or, if I was in a more aggressive mood, spend the money on my content attack.

Hi again Matt, Actually, you don't need to be using the 301 at all. A simple rewrite will do what you are wanting. If you do it like this: RewriteRule ^vacancy/([0-9]+)$ vacancy.php?id=$1 [L] your URLs would be a lot more friendly. The resultant URLs would look like this: /vacancy/12345 Hope that helps, Sha

I managed to strip out the '?q=' query with the htaccess below, but unfortunately this breaks the query. Any way around this?? (http://subdomain.example.com/select-a-card/?q=fuel) RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/$ RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^q=fuel$ RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /fuel/? [R=301, L] BEGIN WordPress RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /index.php [L] END WordPress

That works perfectly, thank you very much

If you look at tutorials you can copy and paste module with all the hard work done. and then you onlyhave to write the redirects

Just had a eureka moment with the issue as above! All that was needed was a .htaccess on the old site like this: Redirect 301 / http://www.newsite.com/ This attempts to pass a user/crawler to the equivalent page on the new site (which doesn't exist), so this is then handled with a .htaccess on the new site which then redirects to the new versions of those pages: Redirect 301 /about.asp http://www.newwebsite.com/about (specific redirect 1) Redirect 301 /latest.asp http://www.newwebsite.com/news (specific redirect 1) Simples!