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If I owned this site I would figure out how to accomplish my goals for ANY traffic that flows into this internal page and roll out a big WELCOME sign on that page.... This is where you can buy widgets! I would want to take in money with BOTH hands rather than just one.

You can use hreflang & Alternate tag to solve this CCTLD duplication issue. http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077

Ralph, I would not suggest "switching" to uk but adding uk. A web page written for UK English will look differently then a page written for US English. Words such as "center" vs "centre", references to London vs references to Washington, monetary units, systems of measurement "miles" vs "kilometers", etc. If you want to improve your UK rankings, offer a UK section of your site, adjust your articles specifically for the UK and obtain links from the UK pointed to this part of your site. If you perform these steps properly you will definitely improve your UK rankings. I'm trying to weigh up whether it is worth the effort of changing it. Only you can answer that question. It depends on how many pages are involved, the quality of your content and your site's profitability.

Links are still viewed as links whether they are no followed or not. A broken link (404) will still be detected regardless of whether you added the nofollow attribute or not. Rather then let those links 404, I would suggest an alternative. Have those links go to a specific page on the site designed for expired links. How about a "Oops, that deal is expired. Click <here>to see a list of our current deals" page.</here>

Thanks. That's exactly what I have told them so I'm glad we agree

As far as the search engines are concerned, the URLs are nice and clean with relevant keywords, but if a user browses the site in IE then the URLs do not maintain their double byte structure and instead convert to ugly URLs like this: mydomain.com/hk/hotels/asia-pacific/-中國-重慶-579-重慶-Sofitel-2-1-晚優惠-連早餐-1025557/

My pleasure! Glad I could help.

Hi Ralph, just wondering if this happened to you again at all, or if you figured out what was causing it.

We have set up each site in the same webmaster tools account and have also used the tool to select which market we wish to target with the site i.e. .com is set to US only and .com/uk is set to UK only. If you land on the .com for the first time, it will show a lightbox (javascript enabled) that lets you choose which site you wish to view. This lightbox has a no index, do follow robots tag included to ensure it passes all link juice. As per my previous comment... I would go for a local TLD over a .com/uk or subdomain approach every day of the week, especially when you have different countries that speak the same language.

Thanks. We've decided not to go down the no index route because although these pages don't have significant rankings and therefore don't drive much in the way of SEO traffic, they do contribute to the overall authority status of the site and the directories in which they sit. For example, a hotel deal will sit within the hotels directory/sub folder so to no index all these details we fear would undermine the overall authority of this directory. I think we are going to go with making the first paragraph visible to the users and search engines... and probably look at combining that with First Click Free

Yes... it is a bit like trying to rely less on finger in the air and a deep understanding of SEO so that I can explain it to clients in way that they can understand it. I agree with Dejan SEO that we should look to maximise the number of linking domains, but I was hoping someone had a way of explaining to clients that sometimes it might be worth investing a little extra on content + placement to get that extra special link from a high PR/MR site.

Thanks for the feedback folks. The sitemap does hold more pages than the standard one, but then if it comes down to the name not being an issue, I guess we needn't worry. I'm still going to change it though.. makes me yak every time i see it.