Welcome to the Q&A Forum

That's a big help thank you!

I have seen reports that bad/old dates are impacting CTR, but the argument for how this impacts ranking is long and perilous, as we all know It does seem likely that bad dates at large scale would impact a wide range of engagement metrics.

I have to agree with Russ. I think the old KW Difficulty model was making that keyword look stronger than it is, and the new one, while maybe a bit low, is more accurate. I'd also suggest, as Pete did, that using any keyword in isolation is unwise. Compare scores for similar terms you might target in the same sector, against the same sorts of competitors, and use that relative data -- KW Difficulty, and indeed PA, DA, and keyword volume, are all far more useful as comparative metrics than absolute ones.

Great explanation about search console error. I had faced the same issue in the search console with some my of keywords related to Check Iqama Expiry. But now, it's working fine.

Well, it looks like they went dark. No response to email or calls. I even developed a child theme for them. Ah well, now to contact their competitors. I'm not doing that out of spite, rather I found an interesting situation. I would very much like to see how something like that changes things. A few CSS tweaks, a banner redesign, and I can have my case again. Fortunately there aren't any contractual obligations involved with the first instance.

I know, it seemed odd to me that after they had been up for a few weeks (and apparently for everyone, not just certain people's serp's) that he would say it was "still a test".  He himself even said he thought Google was overdoing it a bit because of how much space it took up.

Shared IPs can cause issues with reverse lookups, which could make spiders confuse you with sites sharing that IP. Admittedly, it's rare, but there have been cases of penalties jumping within an IP, for example. I suspect that, as IP sharing grows, Google is getting better about this, but I generally like to avoid it.