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Looks like a lot of good information from folks here so I'll be brief. Technically, there's no practical way to redirect the page without redirecting the links. Unless your page serves a 404 or 410 response code, those links will be associated with your domain. The only way to disassociate yourself from these links is through use of the Disavow Tool.

Thanks guys - much appreciated.  Personally I didn't think it mattered which way it went round, however just interested to hear if there was a good reason for this.  The a href= example is a good example of how it shouldn't really matter.

Thanks for the great advice both, much appreciated! That's an awesome post as well Carson, thank you very much for sharing.  I think we are going to have to change our techniques - the point about link building formerly being the easiest part of your job really hit home with me.  It seems that link building is going to be a much more laborious process. As far as agencies go, it's going to take a great deal more in the way of time and resources to service clients.  At the moment, it seems that the only way forward for the average agency is to employ more staff or out-source elements of the link building process.  Either that or SEO simply becomes much more expensive. With that in mind, do you think the days of local businesses ranking alongside high-street brands on P1 may be coming to an end?

"sitelinks being a product of search volume" No, I've seen startup eCom brand sites with embarrassingly low search volume receive sitelinks so that isn't strictly the criteria.

Cheers bozzie311, I'll look into that - much appreciated!

Hi Kyle, Thanks for your resopnse.  The <title>validates no problem.  It is the <meta name="title" content="etaojfopahfopasjfio" /> that does not validate.  I realise this is depreciated, however I still think it is important to include surely?</p></title>

Hi Marcus, Yes I'm afraid so, the client in question removed a word from their company name and therefore they need to change the URL. I'm pretty happy that we'll be able to do it with the minumum of damage, just wanted to put the question out here in case someone had an alternative method based on experience.  I agree there's no perfect way to do it, however I think building some strength for the new site before killing the old one is as good a plan as any. Thanks again.

Thanks both for your responses.  It's a strange one and I can only assume that these pages remain in Google's index - I have checked many link sources and found that the links do not exist and therefore haven't done since the page was deleted.  It seems ridicilous that you should have to 301 every page you delete, there are literally 500+ of these phantom links to non-existant URLs and the site is changing all the time. I have opted to add a 'no index' meta to the 404s and also encourage them to delete from index by adding the pages to the robots.txt file. Let's see if it works - I'll post on here when I know for sure so other people with the same question can see the outcome. Thanks again, Damien and Steven.

I think 301 is good especially if you bought new domains and you wish to pass on the value from your old domain/domains. I did it myself with 2 domains just the other days. Just remember it may take up to 3 months for google to properly move everything and also if you're not moving 1:1  -> every-old-url   to new-urls then you will have a loss in value.

Thank you both, much appreciated.  Their rankings have suffered in the last two weeks and this coincides with their developers creating all this duplicate content - let's see if this fixes that issue! Thanks again.

Still laughing about the frames. Man, I am old, so frames were part of the web back in the day, whoever these people are that are doing this work, they need to put their slippers and reading glasses on and sit down in front of the fire with a glass of warm milk. Frames, made my day I tells ya!

As you said it was a generalization, not necessarily directed at you. The quote you are referring to (mine, not Rands) is a simple caveat to anyone who might be reading this question and thinks that alt text will save the day. Optimizing alt tags is a great way to get the job done and accurately describe the images attached, my point was that stuffing, etc... is not. Again not a direct attack on you, just overall advice for people who might want to go down that road.

Hi, If these are pages that you "don't want to be ranked" then you should add meta "noindex" tag to them immediately so that they are removed from the index and will not be added with new crawls. As evidenced by your own question, they are pages you don't care about. That means you have no reason to make them great pages. This said, leaving them available for indexing is a "panda slap" waiting to happen. I would treat the "noindex" as a priority. Hope that helps, Sha