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Agreed, though Charles could use canonical tags to tell Google that the new pages are authoritative. This may take a while to be indexed, but should prevent any detrimental effects with duplicate content.

It seems so unnatural to want to actually remove content when we spend so long striving to create awesome content!

You can use the meta robots tags as you mentioned in your question, this will prevent search engines indexing the pages, unfortunately we need to tackle the human side of the issue,if anyone links to the article, then eventually the link will result in a 404 page.

There is nothing wrong with a 404 page, they serve an imporant purpose. Since your articles are not around very long and not being indexed by search engines I see no reason to simply leave the 404 in place.

Ensure you have a custom 404 which is an imformative and helpful resource rather than a simple 404 Page not found message. use the 404 to direct the visitor to a category level page which is related to the topic of the article. Offer a simple list of links to various parts of the site that may be of interest.

Check out the SEOmoz articles

www.seomoz.org/blog/personalizing-your-404-error-pages

www.seomoz.org/blog/are-404-pages-always-bad-for-seo

Hope this helps.

Would it be possible to 'Archive' articles after the 1-6month period ?

Archive could just be a database flag that keeps the articles from appearing in Article index thus keeping the same url, but not clogging up main site with hundreds of links to expired articles?

Hi,

Try Google Insights (http://www.google.com/insights/search/), you can do a search over various time frames, get a graph to visualise traffic levels over time and download the data to CSV for Excel.

Cheers,

Aran

If your site is heavy on images, you can always ensure they are all correctly optimised. This will ensure minimum file size, thus quicker dowload times.

I always prefer the pipe for the following reasons, though I don't think it has any specific SEO value.

a) its reader friendly

b) its a natural separator

c) as Seth says below, it looks cool!

d) Whats good for SEOmoz is good for me!

I agree with Roger, though I did initially struggle with Super Cache. In the end I opted to manual configure Gzip compression and caching rules in my HT Access file.

Check out this page which has some info on Cache and Gzip

http://bit.ly/eh8jsD

You'll probably find that you'll get keyword cannibalisation with multiple pages all jockeying for the same Key Phrases.

Possibly a big and risky job, but could you not rewrite the URLs to include the category name rather than cat id?

/Alfa-romeo-147-sport-brakes-en

Without seeing the site and checking out the current structure its hard to say exactly I would structure it. Can you post a link?

Cheers

Aran

Home run! Thanks for that.

I always validate HTML with sites I'm working on, particularly if has been coded by a third party. My reasons for doing so are a careful balance between ensuring spiders can crawl the page without bumping hideous html errors and ensuring a website is accessible on as many devices/browsers.

If the webpage doesn't adhere to standards it could indicate issues with viewing the pages correctly in the myriad of browsers and devices out there. So theres a User Experience issue to consider.

The simplest way to my knowledge is to use the Google site: operator. Simply type site:www.yourdomain.co.uk into Google search box. The results this search brings back will show all the pages Google has indexed for your website.

You can also use cache:www.yourdomain.co.uk to see what google is holding in cache, clicking the Cached link in the listing will show when the site was last indexed.

Hi,

Working in SEO I always cringe when a designer mentions Flash. However my phobia of Flash is old school and maybe I need to get with the times. Google will crawl textual content in Flash, including anchor texts. It will also follow links in Flash and presumably applies the same 'link juice' factors that it would normally apply to links.

Heres an article on Flash and crawling textual content http://bit.ly/dDXYoc

Hope this helps.

Aran