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I like #5 for the reasons you've stated.  Also keywords in the URI string aren't as strong a ranking factor (in my opinion) as they used to be.  My 2 cents.

Hi Rubix (and everyone else!) I actually posted a question of my own that is similar, and another member Vadim Mialik referred me to this video by Matt Cutts (Google) on subdomains vs. subdirectories-- in a nutshell, Matt says that there is really very little difference, and it is up to what you prefer. What do you guys think? P.S. Would be keen to know how you got on with your implementation Cheers, Carlo

If you have access to your website source code, you could always just do a search for absolute anchor tags throughout your site, ending at the protocol (so, search for the beginning of the tag like so " If the site was built correctly, you would only use absolute URLs for external links. This would give you a quick count. But it's not foolproof, as as the anchor tags may not be consistently coded.

Thanks Shane. My syntax wasn't perfect, but after messing about with a few different ones, and closing with [RP], I managed to get it to work. Many thanks!

Thanks for the response. Users had tested in IE, Chrome and Firefox and it caused an issue on each one. I have tested the site in every version of IE on a 32 bit OS with no problems. I'm getting rather stumped. My latest user stated that he's running the professional version of XP, but "on an old laptop with a home version of XP 64-bit, it works fine". So I guess the 64-bit isn't the issue. I really can't imagine that there's any difference between the home OS and professional OS. Oh well... I'll keep looking! Thanks for the responses.

Thanks for the response, and yes, we are moving results pages also. The most important thing is maintaining the visibility of main site, and we would not want to harm it by moving it completely. I have heard that subdomains struggle to get independent SEO strength though - do you know if there is some truth to this? Thanks Matt

Hi, We have two sites mysite.com and aa.mysite.com. We want to track these sites separately. We created two different properties with IDs UA-XXX-1 for main domain UA-XXX-2 for subdomain. gaq code for main domain is as following, gaq code for subdomain is as following, It works well for subdomain. But we want to see traffic from subdomain to main domain as referral. What is wrong with the gaq code of main domain?  Do i need to change code or is it enough to inactivate subdomain tracking option in profile settings of main domain? Thanks in advance,

You can set up each subdomain on a campaign, or you can set them all up on a root domain campaign. If you choose to set up subdomain campaigns, each will be crawled up to 10,000 pages. Remember, each campaign will use a slot. For most PRO members, you are limited to 5 campaigns. Setup is simple. You can choose either root domain or subdomain on the setup screen, and enter your appropriate URL. More information in the help documentation here. Hope this helps!

Hi Matt, I would agree 100% with Ryan's comments on robots.txt. In addition to this, it is a notoriously unreliable method for blocking...if the crawler happens to come to your site via an external link to any page other than the home page it will not see robots.txt. Sha.

Good answer Yannick. here are some resources: http://www.free-seo-news.com/all-about-robots-txt.htm http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html Good luck

Thanks for all of the responses. I wasn't aware of opensiteexplorer.org and it does seem pretty handy. Not sure I 100% trust it (a few common sense checks displays some, but not all links), but it's a good starting point. Cheers M

Thanks for the swift response, Gianluca. I think I understand the problem you have pointed out, but I'm rather surprised that it has been set up in such a way... Or that that would have more of an adverse affect than multiple URLs with the same standard content. I'm willing to change that to see if it fixes the problem though. Please take all of the time you need... It is a very large site which has been pieced together, bit-by-bit, over many years! Matt

It does not matter, 301 will transfere most of your link juice, but you will ose a bit, 301's leak a little each time. but what i would do, rather then 301, is simply link from all relevant content to the page you want to rank with relevant link text, SE's will see that that page is the important one for that term. If it is duplicate then i would remove it

Thanks bootleg - appreciate the external links. Guy

Thanks Ryan. This is exactly as expected... I fear we have a fair bit of cannibalization across the site, so better get on and make some changes. Many thanks Guy