Thanks for your help guys - and also reassuring to confirm my initial recommendations were correct.

Hi Mozzers

I have a client that had a lot of soft 404s that we wanted to tidy up. Basically everything was going to the homepage.

I recommended they implement proper 404s with a custom 404 page, and 301 any that really should be redirected to another page.

What they have actually done is implemented a 404 (without the custom 404 page) and then after a short delay 301 redirected to the homepage. I understand why they want to do this as they don't want to lose the traffic, but is this a problem with SEO and the index? Or will Google treat as a hard 404 anyway?

Many thanks

Hi Diana

I went through this same discussion with a client of mine. Only the other way round - ie should he go to local domains rather than the .com that he has. I did a lot of research and came up with the conclusion that local domains are great IF you have lots of local resource to support the site - for local content, local links, etc. If the resource is there then the main benefit is that people in each country often favour visiting sites with a country domain.

Otherwise, If the resource is not there then you are better off with a .com domain where the focus can go towards building overall authority for just 1 site rather than many - as you say, it helps with the link juice. Languages can be placed in subfolders (/de/ etc) and that way Google will know to return the correct version in the country Google version.

Hope that helps - good luck

Thanks very much everyone - very helpful.

Good point re page speed - the pages are certainly slow to load so this could well be due to the huge amount of js and bad code.

And yes, think the duplicate tags should be sorted - this shouldn't be difficult.

Has anyone got any tangible results that they've seen as a result of cleaning up js and code?

My client has a site that we are trying to optimise. However the code is really pretty bad.

There are 205 errors showing when W3C validating. The >title>, , <keywords> tags are appearing twice. There is truly excessive javascript. And everything has been put in tables.</keywords>

How much do you think this is really impacting the opportunity to rank? There has been quite a bit of discussion recently along the lines of is on-page SEO impacting anymore.

I just want to be sure before I recommend a whole heap of code changes that could cost her a lot - especially if the impact/return could be miniscule.

Should it all be cleaned up?

Many thanks