Looks like you found the solution below. Nice work!

Hi Kimberly,

The rel="canonical" is a good option when you can't 301 a page. If you can 301 a page, such as /index.html or some other duplicate version, it's usually a better way to go. As you said, it removes all doubt about where to send visitors and link equity.

Both rel canonicals and 301s pass about the same amount of link equity (thought to be around 85%) so it's safe to use either.

Canonical tags are usually best when you have lots of parameters needed to render the page, like homepage?color=red&length=long&manu=apple. In this case it wouldn't make much sense to 301, and the rel canonical is easier to implement.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO.

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

Unfortunately, Moz doesn't provide historical info of metrics like DA or PA (although it's something we'd love to do in the future)

A favorite tool of many SEO's is Searchmetrics visibility tool. Although this only provides a rough estimate of a domains visibility in search results over time, it's proved valuable in detecting penalties and changes in search volumne for sites over time, although it works best with large sites.

Majestic SEO also provides historical link history. Access is limited with a free account, but paid accounts are generally reasonable.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

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.

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.

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

I don't think there's a clear answer. Longer headlines are harder to share on some social media sites (especially twitter) and Google won't display much past 55-75 characters in search results.

But from a user engagement perspective, I bet Huffington post is finding some success with the longer headlines. This probably has as much to do with how they display the headlines on their site, and also how they distribute the content and share, so it doesn't mean this is a system that would work for everyone.

Best practice remains writing headlines between 55-75 characters.

But best practices were made to be broken