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Hi Graphbyte - services like this (that fake social signals) have been around for a long time. In my experience and my opinion, they have no real value for SEO or for what you really want from social media marketing (engagement from real people, building brand equity, driving traffic, etc). However, some folks do use them to show their boss/client increased metrics - to me, that's dishonest, but the practice persists.

If all you need are the numbers/metrics to go up, this will probably work for that. However, if you're looking for any additional benefit (traffic, brand growth, new real followers, SEO impact, etc), I'd avoid it and spend your money and time elsewhere.

I think this is exactly what Google hoped would happen with the Penguin update - SEOs and marketers who invested in gray/black hat links would have such an utterly horrific time trying to dig out that it would scare a broad swath of the industry into more white hat territory. Whether that's actually working is arguable, but it was certainly a goal of the update.

If you are ready to make the move over to the old domain, I wouldn't stop you. However, if you've built up some valuable brand equity, visitor loyalty and marketing prowess outside of SEO on this site, there's a few other possibilities:

• Work hard on UX  and UI. Google hates penalizing beautiful sites that visitors love, and if you do get a manual review, this can help.
• Make the content truly exceptional, too. Ensure that there's nothing that feels like artificial/manipulative/done-just-for-rankings stuff on the site. Again, this makes it more likely that any reconsideration request will work
• Send out as many requests for link removal as possible and include the lists of where/how you acquired links and how you've tried to remove them in your reconsideration request
• Hope and pray

This process might not get you back in, but it could work. Google's requiring a "good faith" effort and some proof of said effort, but there's a possibility your site might get by. For the future, I'd strongly recommend sticking to entirely editorially given/earned links.

Wish you luck!

That sounds like a poor decision in my opinion and experience. An "old" domain isn't worth anything more than a "new" domain - age is not a factor in a website's rankings or any other marketing-related element. It is the case that many old website outperform many new ones by virtue of having built content, links, shares, mentions, branding, and marketing of all kinds for years. But if you compared two websites with the same metrics on those fronts, 6 months vs. 6 years is meaningless.

If it's the case that the old website is more brandable, or the client wants to use it because she/he prefers the name and wants to operate the business under that moniker, then it's understandable. But, if the client believes that age alone makes the domain more valuable/worthwhile/easier-to-rank, I'd challenge that assumption.

Best of luck!

A fluctuation of 4 points shouldn't be a concern at all. It could be that our machine learning algo for domain authority picked up on some new fluctuations, or that as we found new links, your overall authority dropped compared to the max. I'd recommend watching 4-5 of your key competitors and see if their numbers also dropped, stayed similar or rose. If you see your DA dropping over several indices while you competition rises or stays the same, you could infer that either the links you've acquired aren't as valuable or that you're losing ground in comparison to others.

Cheers!

Thanks @Chrwald - I'm going to ask Dr. Pete to take a look at these.

Hi DMMoon - it's possible that Bing will make changes that mess up how analytics counts their visits, but hard to say for sure. They have made those errors in the past. My advice is just to keep an eye on your analytics data as they make the changes, and if you see Bing traffic drop when they move to HTTPS, you've got a likely culprit! The SEO news world will probably report on it, too.

I've not seen penalties transfer via the 301 very often (in fact, I've only heard stories of it but never seen it confirmed with a public example). I'd probably do the 301 - as you said, it's not a great experience otherwise for visitors who bookmarked or get referred to the old domain.

If you're really nervous, you could create a message that shows up on the site and refers visitors to the new location, but that's a lot of extra work, and requires that extra click, which isn't great for UX.

I suppose if you're sure Google is going to pass the penalty, you could use the 301, but robots.txt block the site from being accessed, so Google wouldn't actually see the site being moved over (thus, it would show Google you're doing this purely for UX and not for SEO).

Hi Rosemary - can you share some examples of the URLs and the queries that bring them up in search results? If so, we can likely do a diagnosis of what might be going on with Google and why the pages aren't correctly showing the redirected-to URLs.

Consistency is a hard thing to achieve in this world for three reasons:

• individual links fluctuate (new links appear, old ones go away)

• the size of the web as a whole changes (which moves the bar for link metrics like PR/mR/mT/etc)

• Google itself changes how it measures/counts links (and our PA/DA algos try to react to these changes through the machine learning process)

Because of these, the best recommendation I can give is to compare yourself to several competitors or cohorts in your space and watch the metrics for all of these sites in comparison to your own.

Hi Mark - yes! If you're using the New Zealand select in the drop down for engines, those other scores should be accurate.

Cheers!

Interesting. If you share a screenshot of what you're seeing with the filters (IE 11 only, Bing traffic) here on Q+A as a discussion, you may get some more folks willing to share theirs as well. The Moz team would likely be happy to share ours.

Hi Monu - shortened URLs generally aren't going to accrue much PA (or much link equity), because many (most) folks who link to them won't link to the shortener but to the URL it resolves to.

I'd also say that there's almost no circumstance I can imagine where it's actually useful or desirable to have a high PA score (or high ranking ability) for the shortened URL. You want the URL that actually resolves -- the one Google will show in its listings -- to get all the links. Shorteners could go out of business or stop redirecting properly or change from 301s to something else to track clicks, and then you'd lose that link equity to the final target. Thus, always better to have it go to the resolved URL.

In my experience, the best way to absolutely get rid of them is to use the 410 permanently gone status code, then resubmit them for indexation (possibly via an XML sitemap submission, and you can also use Google's crawl testing tool in Search Console to double-check). That said, even with 410, Google can take their time.

The other option is to recreate 200 pages there and use the meta robots noindex tag on the page to specifically exclude them. The temporary block in Google Search Console can work, too, but, it's temporary and I can't say whether it will actually extend the time that the redirected pages appear in the index via the site: command.

All that said, if the pages only show via a site: command, there's almost no chance anyone will see them

If the backlinks come from primarily other https sites, you might try Majestic SEO (or Google Webmaster Tools as mentioned above). We'll have HTTPS crawling in a few months - it's a high priority right now.

Thanks! Check out https://moz.com/blog/can-seos-stop-worrying-keywords-focus-topics-whiteboard-friday for more info on exactly that topic. Basically, I'd suggest targeting all the keywords that target the same searcher intent together on a page, and split up any that have different intent/search goals to different pages.

Given the needs, I suspect you'll want to talk to one of the clickstream data providers about a custom deal. Jumpshot and SimilarWeb are the two I'd look at. Just be prepared to pay a lot, as their data is proprietary and they can thus charge quite a bit.

Either we haven't crawled any links that point to #2, or the links we've seen to it don't pass any link equity (e.g. they're nofollowed or on pages with meta robots=nofollow, etc).

Hi JoaoCJ - In cases like these, I don't usually sweat the URL length too much. It is OK to go over a bit -- our recommendations come from correlation analysis and testing. Observing Google's rankings, it tends to be the case that pages with fewer parameters (like 0) tend to outperform pages with more, and that shorter URLs tend to outperform longer ones. That said, it's not a hard and fast rule, more a sloping line.

As far as the filters go, I might consider using rel=canonical unless you're sure you want those pages separately indexed. If that's the case (you DO want them indexed), perhaps consider using static URLS -- even something like a number in the URL could work, e.g. /123/.  For the pagination, Google's also got the rel=prev/next tags that I'd suggest employing.

Wish you all the best!

Hi Wayne (and other folks),

Sorry for my delayed response. I agree that this is a serious problem faced by our indices, and it's one we're working to solve. The main issue is how we make a web index. In order to get metrics and all the views that power OSE (as compared to more of the barebones list-of-links offered by some other web indices), we have a lengthy processing step.

This means we can crawl the web for a few weeks, then we need to process for a few weeks, and our processing time often puts us behind other indices in finding and displaying links.

We're working on a way to eliminate this issue, but I suspect it will take 6-9 months to get this in place. In the meantime, we're building a datacenter that can process links more quickly so we can hopefully get better (even if it's not perfect) in the meantime. Look for faster indexing by January/February of 2013, and then much faster discovery by summer.

Hi ATP - we're working on getting the UK volume data (along with other countries) into KW Explorer, hopefully before we shut off KW Difficulty. I believe we may be extending that June 2nd deadline.

In the meantime, I'd recommend using AdWords' KW Tool and selecting "United Kingdom" in their country dropdown. KW Difficulty's data comes from there as well (via GrepWords).