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For now, I will have to stick to my over-optimization theory, in part because I have seen it too many times and have nothing else to go on short of a full audit. Even natural links can cause it. It is not fair, to an extent, but it happens a lot.

HI Luken,

I would never completely trust a 3rd party service. You still have to check each link. Blindly removing or disavowing is not the way to go.

That said, I've used Link Detox and feel comfortable recommending them. That said, I still add a layer of manual review on top of their process.

Removeem and Rmoov are both fine services, IMO, but may not be right for everyone.

By Domain Rank, do you mean Domain Authority?

You can manipulate Domain Authority by redirecting a bunch of high authority pages to your domain. If you stopped the redirects, the Domain Authority would drop again. If this is what happened, it's not something a reputable SEO would do.

Typically, it Domain Authority updates every few weeks, usually within a month, maximum.

Sorry for my late reply... just saw this and trying to catch up.

Yes, I have seen very specific keyword filters/penalties applied. Often is caused by over-optimization of inbound anchor text. Think of some site linking to you somewhere with "phone" in the anchor text located in a sidebar or footer, and linking 1000s of times.

This can either be a normal over-optimization filter or part of a Penguin hit. Either way, the solution is to either remove/de-optimize backlinks, or de-optimize your site. (like, remove sitewide or footer links with the word "phone" in them)

These can be tough problems to diagnose and root out. Hope you get to the bottom of it.

Hi Alex,

I get your frustration! It's sort of an unusual situation. Unfortunately, because those are different root domains, our rank trackers lack the logic to combine them in an either/or fashion.

As for other services, I'm not aware of any platforms that have this functionality, but it's possible. I'm familiar with Authority Labs, and I don't think they could help. Possibly http://www.advancedwebranking.com/?

Regardless, best of luck with your SEO!

It's a tough call, but I'd preference the 302.

The reason that it's tough is because search engines will often treat 302s like 301s simply because webmasters implement them wrong so often.

The 302 is the correct choice. One thing I might consider is canonical tags pointing at the original URLs. This will hopefully give a "hint" to search engines what the correct URL is supposed to be.

With a straight 301, you generally lose about 15-20% of your search visibility. You may risk some loss with any type of redirect, but hopefully when things return to normal after a couple weeks everything will go back to square one.

Hope this helps!

Practically speaking, in my experience the difference ranges from a 1:1 relationship to a 1:8 relationship, which is a huge spread.

A lot of SEOs I know, including our tools developers here at Moz, have shown an interest in Grep Words. Might be worth checking out if you were interested.

I tend to agree with James in terms of bounce rate. Google tries to segment the most relevant result by country, so a low bouncerate outside your target market hopefully wouldn't hurt you much.

That said, you can specify a target country in Google Webmaster Tools. Instructions are here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en

Using this setting doesn't ensure your website wont appear in foreign results, but it does give a "hint" to Google that the content isn't targeted for that region.

Hope this helps!

Cyrus

I don't believe it's on the current roadmap, but you can check and add this and/or any feature request here: https://seomoz.zendesk.com/forums/293194-Moz-Feature-Requests

In our last Ranking Factors Correlation study, Domain Authority had a 0.29 correlation, which is one of the stronger correlations we measure.

The strongest metric, Page Authority, showed a .39 correlation.

The idea of Domain Authority is that comparing 2 websites... all other things being equal... one is more likely to rank than the other. A significant portion of the weighting factors in Domain Authority is links. As Google shifts the significance of links, this changes.

But as you've observed, in the real world things are rarely equal. Moz is also working on spam scoring to help us better discount links that Google may likely be ignoring.

Interestingly, with all the talks about links and Google, what's surprising is how important links still are. Metrics like DA and PA haven't changed that much in their ability to gauge ranking potential. Perhaps someday we'll need new signals. For now they are still reliably useful.

Couple of issues I should point out:

• Most expired domain tools are still stuck in the PageRank era. These include sites like DropDay, Freshdrop, etc.
• Many domains, either with high PageRank or Domain Authority, have often been penalized by Google, or the sellers have manipulated these metrics through nefarious means in order to boost sales. Any domain with existing backlink you want to carefully audit before purchasing. Buyer beware!
• It's also potentially dangerous to redirect expired domains for the same reason. If you're buying an existing site for traffic and exposure - that's one thing. But attempting to simply take advantage of the existing backlinks isn't always the best policy.

I don't actually know too many expired domain services that use Moz Metrics with the exception of Flippa. NameJet has a nice exportable list of expiring domains that you could look up metrics for using something like the Mozscape API, although this may not scale for individual use.

Hope this helps! Best of luck.

Michelle & Blake,

Tim raised some good points, so rather than address those I'll try to answer your question directly.

Yes, you could theoretically rank for these unique SKUs if you were to build some half-way decent content around them - especially if the competition is low as you say.

It's not likely as easy as putting the keywords in your Meta tags ( I assume you mean the meta description tag, or even the meta keywords tag which most folks don't use anymore)

If you really want to rank for these keywords, they should probably be a natural part of your content and body copy. To Tim's point, could you target these terms in a way that made sense to visitors? Perhaps yes. If your visitor was looking for a product similar too or a substitution for a particular SKU, this might make sense - but you actually have to create content around the terms, and not simply stick them on the page or hide them in the meta data - does this make sense?

You would want to target these keywords and ideas just like any other. Tools like the on-page grader might give you good idea where to start.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO!

Some questions to ask:

Is there any reasonable expectation of traffic by redirecting the domains? i.e. do the domains receive traffic now? If so, a redirect may be in order.

Is there a chance you'll want to use the domains in the future, or do you want to keep the domains out of your competitor's hands? If so,  you may want to hold onto them.

Otherwise, if you're redirecting unused domains simply for link equity, there's likely very little value in that strategy.

Unfortunately, Google may continue to keep those pages in its index for months, even if they return a 404. The 2 best options in these cases is usually:

1. Claim the profile in GWT - which would probably be possible but requires a lot of work with Godaddy configuring the subdomains just so you could claim the profile and de-index.
2. I haven't tried it, but Google introduced a URL removal tools for URLs you don't controll. Might be a good use case here. Here's some info: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/12/improving-url-removals-on-third-party.html

Hi Sarah,

My gut tells me the truth is a combination of the two tools. It does look like a highly competitive keyword from an organic point of view. The top 3 ranking results are the National Institute of Health and Wikipedia - all of which would be hard to beat.

But it's not a highly commercial term - so I bet the CPC would be lower for PPC than many other comparative terms.

That said, you can still win with a long-tail SEO strategy. It does require work and effort. But the idea is you would create lots of high quality content around this keyword theme and try to rank for potentially 100s of variations and similarly themed content. This strategy, when done with sincere effort, often succeed against the most competitive of terms.

That said, it does require a lot of time and effort and energy. If you're looking for quick results, PPC may be the way to go for you. Keep in mind as soon as you stop paying for PPC, the returns stop immediately, while good content can drive traffic for years after the initial investment. (if it sounds like I'm preaching, I'm really not - I actually run PPC ads all the time when appropriate)

Hope this helps! Best of luck.

There were several Panda updates around September 2012 that may have impacted your site: http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change#2012

Many times, when you are hit with an algorithmic penalty this is exactly what it feels like - you get a burst of new links and traffic, and everything feels like it's going to be okay, and then traffic drops back to depressed levels once again. I've been there many times where it feels like you're banging your head against a wall.

My best advice would be to take a serious look at both your site by doing a full audit both on-site and off-site, and take another serious look at your backlink profile. If I had to take a stab in the dark, I'd guess your looking at a lingering Panda problem. This would actually be good news, as these are often correctable.

Keep us updated and let us know how it goes!

In my limited experience, 301's will redirect +1's, as Arjen said.

For example, this page http://moz.com/blog/how-to-rank gained most of it's +1's before a 301 redirect, and those plus 1's are now associated with the page.

Hi Tyler,

In addition to what Fredrico said, I would recommend running a "Full Report" in the keyword difficulty tool. This will give you over 20 more data points to analyze.

Some of the factors to look for include inbound anchor text, which may or may not include a mix of partial and exact match anchor text.

Like Fredrico said, Google uses over 200 signals to rank each page - some are more elusive and harder to measure than others. For a small hint, you may want to look at our most recent Ranking Factors Survey, especially the predictions and opinions from the experts as to what goes into Google's algorithm.

I am not opposed to high-quality, niche specific directories. Specifically, I would look for industry-specific directories (not broad directories with industry specific categories) that offer good, human written descriptions, editorial reviews and do not allow the submitter to dictate the anchor text.

Usually, directories run by industry organizations, non-profits, government bodies, universities, community services, etc generally make fine directories - especially if inclusion means good referral traffic as well.

Everything else, including general directories, heavily templated thin content sites with optimized anchor text I would avoid.

The one quick thing I would suggest is to look at your "Anchor Text" report in Open Site Explorer and try to determine where those links are coming from. It's very possible they are coming from a single domain e.g. a sitewide sidebar link for example.

If the # of linking root domains hasn't changed drastically, this is more than likely the cause.