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.

Hi there,

I'm sorry to hear your rankings took a hit. That's a major drag. Major ranking changes can be caused by 100s of different things, so it's important to look at as many elements as you can, and it may take a long time to do a thorough investigation. Even then, it's not unusual for some webmasters to never know why their rankings changed.

The first 3 questions you want to investigate:

• Have you been hit by a penalty?
• Have you been hit by an algorithmic update? (as Pixel by Pixel pointed out)
• Any major crawling issues? You can check Moz or Google Webmaster Tools

If the answer turns up negative, you might consider a full site audit. Keep in mind, you may not have done anything "wrong." Algorithms change, and you might simply need to change your tactics to keep pace.

My understanding is you want Google to see it but not Moz or other SEO crawlers, is that right?

I can't speak for all other crawlers, but you could accomplish this via robots.txt, although I really wouldn't recommend it because SEO crawlers use so many different user agents, you would have to exclude so many of them you might exclude important crawlers such as Bing or Google Mobile (for example).

The idea would be to allow Googlebot and other crawlers to your site, but exclude everything else. Again, I don't recommend this because it's an overly-complex solution with a high degree of error possible.

You could also do some fancy magic by detecting user-agents, but that's even more dangerous, so I'm not even going to go there

Hi there,

Not sure I have enough information to weigh in on the first part of your question - Google will index whatever it sees on the page. If you deliver the content to Google, then they index it. The problem comes when you deliver different content to different users. Try a tool like SEO Browser to see how googlebot views your site.

http://www.seo-browser.com/

To answer your second question, its often hard to rank near-duplicate pages for specific cities/states without running into massive duplicate content problems. Matt Cutts himself actually addressed this awhile back. He basically stated if you have multiple pages all targeting different locations, it's best to include a few lines of unique content on each page (I recommend the top) to make each unique.

“In addition to address and contact information, 2 or 3 sentences about what is unique to that location and they should be fine,” Source

But this technique would be very hard with only 300 product page. The alternative, stuffing these pages with city/state information for every combination possible, is not advised.

http://www.seomoz.org/q/on-page-optimization-to-rank-for-multiply-cities

So in the end, it's actually not hard to rank for city-state keywords without having it in the URL, but the information should be in the content or other places like the title tag or internal link structure - but to do this for 1000's of locations with only 300 pages without keyword stuffing is near impossible.

The best thing to do is figure out how to create unique content for every page you want to rank for, and take that route.

For example, I might create a "Seattle" page, create unique content for the top of the page, then list 50 or so products with the unique Seattle prices. (This is a rough strategy - you'd have to refine it greatly to work for your situation.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Okay, a few points:

1. In addition to using Yoast to noindex archive subpages, you may want to also consider seting it to noindex both tag and category pages.

These are found in Yoast under "Titles and Meta > Taxonomies"

2. While the Yoast plugin will put a "Noindex" tag on the page, this doesn't remove it from Google's index right away. Google first has to crawl the page. Using the index removal tool does help.

3. If your site dropped from 320 visits a day to 30, you may have different problems than duplicate title tags and/or content. Not sure what to tell you to look at, but backlinks, penalties or something else may be to blame.

If you're interrested, here's a great (free) webinar on Wordpress SEO http://moz.com/webinars/advanced-wordpress-seo

Hi Irving...

Really interested in your answer here, because I haven't heard this before. My understanding has always been that it doesn't make much of a difference, mostly based on comments Matt Cutts made in this 2010 Webmaster Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=971qGsTPs8M

That said, I may be out of date on the subject. I'm sure there might be correlation data out there I'm not aware of. Any thoughts you can share on the subject would be greatly appreciated!

Google has trended towards devaluing links between domains with "Administrative Relationships." It's a good bet that they can figure out you own both domains.

That said, it's only a devaluation. The links still count - just not as much. Think of it more like internal anchor text from your own site. Like Nakul said, since it's only one domain, you're not going to suffer a "link-wheel" scheme penalty or anything similar. It's natural and normal for sister sites to link to one another - even groups of sister sites. But the links likely won't help as much as external links form outside sites.

Hi Virginia!

My personal opinion and experience are that although keywords in the URL may have a minor place in Google's ranking algorithms (sometimes to a negative effect in the case of over-optimization) both keywords and URL structure have a far greater impact on user experience and click-through rate.

A couple of studies (here's one) have shown slightly negative correlations between higher rankings and both the length of the url and number of hyphens. In other words, _shorter URLs with less hyphens tend to perform slightly better in search results. _

On the other hand, URLs with keywords in them tend to get higher click through rates.

There's also a couple of schools of thoughts about subdirectories vs. "flat" architecture. Some would argue that subdirectories give your content semantic structure, (i.e. everything in the utc folder could be related to one another) while others argue that a "flat" architecture with fewer folders can lead to better crawling (although I've never seen any sold evidence of this.

Regardless, I don't believe there's one right answer.... it's best to experiment and use your best judgement as to what will lead to the best user experience.

To add to what Kyle said, the reason you are seeing these statistics is because you have virtually no inbound links that point to your domain.

Without inbound links, web crawlers have no way of finding your site. Search Engines such as Google also use links to determine how popular a site is. To put it (over)simply, the more links that point to your site, the better you are likely to do in search results.

The best way to improve your domain metrics like Domain Authority (and even PageRank) is to start building links. But first, I'd start by reading the Beginners Guide to SEO.

Building high quality links is difficult and rewarding, but almost nothing is more rewarding for SEO.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!