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Yes, if the client doesn't mind not having the content on the old domain, then 301 redirects are the best solution.  Without seeing the navigation menu and the two sites, it's hard to evaluate whether you need to change the links.  If it would seem odd to user to click the current link and land on the new domain, then what you suggest sounds good.  If both sites are clearly identified as being the same company and look pretty similar, you may not need to change the link(s).  The 301 redirects will take care of the search engines, the change to the link(s) is a question of user experience.

I'm not sure that any redirect is guaranteed that Google won't pass on the links to the .uk domain.  The two options I could think of which would probably be the least likely for Google to pass on the links would be,

1. You could setup a meta-refresh redirect on the .com.  Make sure it's a few seconds and not instant.

2. Redirect everything from the .com site to a single landing page on the .com site.  Put a message on that landing page that tells visitors the site has moved and provide a link to the new site.

Neither of these solutions are great from a user experience standpoint, but their the least likely for Google to pass on all the bad links from the .com site.

That's what should happen in theory.  Your telling Google an Bing that the original content is at the new domain with the canonical tags.  They should essentially ignore the content on the old site and only care about the content of the new site, since it's the original.

There's two caveats, though.  First, is the Google expressly states that they treat the canonical tag as a suggestion.  So, there's no guarantee that they'll treat the tags the way they are intended.  Secondly, if the new domain has already been hit by Panda, then you have a bit of an uphill battle.  Google has already decided that they think the real source of the content is the old domain name and you are trying to convince them they have it backwards.

Even with the caveats, though, canonical tags are the only solution that fits the situation and the client's wishes (to still have the content on both sites).  The only other suggestion you could give is to redo the content on the new site so it is unique.  That's a lot more work, though.

Andy,

The issue with keywords in anchor text is usually a matter of the overall link profile.  If you look at all the links pointing back to the site, do a large percent of them include money keywords?  If so, than you'll want to balance that out either by removing links or getting new links without keywords.  As to how much a "large percent" is, there's no clear figure.  Some would say 25% and others as low as 10%.  The best way to determine that for your site is to just keep reducing the percentage of keyword-rich links until you see the site moving back up in the search results.

Depending on how many links this site has in total and how many of them are either spammy or keyword-rich (or both), you may just be able to ignore them and just concentrate on building good quality, natural links.  If the site doesn't have a lot of links right now, you may be able to achieve the right balance pretty quickly while also continuing to build the site's authority (instead of removing links and potentially loosing authority).

It sounds like you have done pretty much everything you could do to remove those pages from Google, and that Google has removed them.

There are two possibilities that I can think of. First, Google is finding new pages or new URLs at least. These may be old pages that have some sort of a parameter on them or something like that that are causing Google to find some new pages even though you're not adding any new pages.

Another possibility is that, I found that the site:search is not entirely accurate. So, it's more like anything else that Google gives us words this kind of estimate of the actual figure. It's possible that Google was giving you a smaller number of pages if in that original 3700 they said they had. And now they're just reporting more of the pages that they had had in their index, which they weren't showing before.

By the way, when I do a search for site:top four office.co.uk, I only get 2600 results.

In theory, nothing should change and it should not hurt your SEO, but there's always some risk involved whenever you start redirecting pages. There may be some authority that's lost or Google may take some time and shuffle things around for a while. So, I would consider if there are other options. If you have good rankings for these pages, see if there's another way that you can track the traffic in a reliable way before you go messing around with 301 redirects. If it's the only way to track what you need to track, then what you're planning should work in theory.

From what you've told us, it sounds like the biggest issue is probably the widget links. Google has specifically stated that they don't consider widget links to be very natural. They are not links that people are editorially deciding to put on their sites. So, sites that have a majority of the links coming back to them as widget links are being hit by Penguin. The simple solution to this is to simply use the nofollow tag for the link in the widget, and that should put you within the guidelines of what Google wants. It also should solve your reciprocal link issue if that's even an issue. It's not going to be a reciprocal link if the link going to you has a nofollow. You could also possibly add nofollow links to the links going out to the companies.

I don't know that reciprocal linking is your real issue here because reciprocal linking itself isn't a huge problem. It's when it's done as a linking scheme and it makes up the majority of your links. So, I would recommend adding a nofollow tag to the widget. Don't remove the widget itself because you want to use your experience, but put a nofollow on the widget and then go from there and try to generate some real links that are not just from the companies that are linking to you to get reviews.

I haven't used a specific WP plugin which I could recommend, but I did a quick search and found the following which may work for you:

http://wordpress.org/plugins/simple-301-redirects/

As for whether it's alright to link some to your homepage, certainly.  My recommendation would be to redirect to the page that is closest in topic to what your old page was about.  If that's your homepage, that's fine.  If you have category page that is related, that's better.  If you have a page that is covering the exact same topic, that's best.  Just choose the best option available.

The other consideration is time.  If we're talking about thousands and thousands of redirects, then you may just be best off redirecting to your homepage and saving hours and hours of work.  Either that or outsourcing the work.

Good luck.  If you find a good plugin that does what you need, let us know what plugin you used.

301 redirects is definitely the way to go. How to do it will depend on the platform in the system that you're using. For example, I'm using Linux servers with a cPanel platform and I'm able to set up a .htaccess file and put the redirects in that .htaccess file. I know Microsoft servers have a similar file, though I can't remember the .name of it.

So, depending on your system and on how much access you have to the servers and the server files, you may be able to set up something like about .ht access or you might have to set something up within your website itself. So, it's difficult to say without knowing what your actual system is, but you definitely want to be setting up 301 redirects for those URLs that are sending 404 errors.

There isn't any issue using both within a single website.  I use both because I use them to signify different things, as mentioned above.  I've even used both in the same title.

I don't believe there's any difference from a search engine standpoint between hyphens ( - ) in vertical bars ( | ). It's pretty much your own preference. You may also want to consider how visitors to your site will respond seeing pipes versus hyphens, and which produces better click-through rates.

Personally, I like to use pipes to distinguish between two concepts and hyphens to connect two concepts. For example, if I have a company that produces auto parts, I might use a hyphen in their title tag, e.g. "auto parts-the company name" if I'm trying to connect these two. On the other hand, if I'm trying to distinguish two ideas like auto parts and auto repair, I might use the pipe in between them because I'm trying to distinguish the two ideas, but that's just a personal preference.

Here is a short video from Matt Cutts a few years ago where he says that hyphens and pipes don't make a difference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2_7PTio3Qc