fishfinger - 1:32 pm on Nov 8, 2006 (gmt 0)

I think a 301 to a new .co.uk domain would be the Google ranking equivilent of suicide.

I agree. Since BigDaddy cam along you will effectively sandbox your site if you move domains - doesn't matter whether you re-brand to a new domain or just switch extension. I've had two sites hit by this; nice of Google to tell us that 301s were no longer honoured wasn't it?

Re : Canonical Issues

I have had a few sites affected where on top of *never* linking internally to /index.htm or similar (I've not done this on a site for 3 years I always use the domain - in fact I always use absolute links, never relative for all pages on all sites) I use htaccess to avoid this ever happening.

It's a reasonable explanation but it just doesn't fit what I'm seeing on more than one site.