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Sorry, I'm not seeing the bad URL(s) in the cache. Could you provide a sample Google query that's showing the hijacking URL?

Are you trying to prevent future hijacking or undo the SEO damage done by the previous hijacking? Sorry, I'm not completely clear on what happened or where you're at in the recovery process.

Weird... yeah, under normal operations, output buffering shouldn't be on. There probably are legitimate uses for it for more complex sites, but not as a default option.

It's tough to speak in generalities, but in almost all of the cases where I suspect negative SEO was in play, there was an inherent weakness or problems in the link profile to begin with. If you add those problems to a domain with a questionable history, your risk is going to be fairly high. If you were a new site in a completely different industry with no history (or a good history), then the history of that domain might not matter. In your case, though, I'm hearing some alarm bells.

Also keep in mind that unless you're going to start over cold-turkey, and not 301-redirect any of the old site, you'll carry any link-related problems with you. So, re-launching on a new domain is definitely a big decision and will probably take months of work to rebuild momentum. Granted, waiting for the next Penguin refresh could take months, too, so I understand your dilemma.

If you're going to take this step, though, I'd put the time and money into a domain with a clean history. You can't afford to do this twice.

I'm confused about one thing - how did you request URL removal in Google Webmaster Tools if you no longer own the domain?

It looks like Google is caching some pages of your Southernafricatravel.com domain and showing them as appearing on Preferredsafaris.com. When I dig into the cache, it's actually showing your main/active site. This could be because of an old canonical relationships between them (whether actual canonical tags, 301-redirects, or something similar), or it could be because they contained duplicate content and Google chose to view them as canonical. Sometimes, that happens even if you don't specify it.

I don't love that the new owner has put up spam irrelevant to the domain, and it's possible that could bite you somehow, but I suspect it's unlikely. Once Google sees that this old pages don't resolve, I think you'll see them gradually disappear. There is no duplicate content at this point.

The jury's really still out on these, all around. As Lesley said, it depends on if and when people adopt them (on the user side), and Google often plays new domain extensions by ear. If an extension gets very spammy, they may start to see it as low-value.

My prediction is that keywords in the extension will carry some weight, but it's going to be a fairly weak signal. So "chicago-divorce.attorney" could give you a tiny boost toward ranking for "Chicago divorce attorney", but it's not going to be enough to make a difference for a competitive phrase. We're even seeing keywords in the root domain slowly losing traction as stand-alone signals. It's not enough to buy a keyword-matched domain in 2014.

If you're in a position where there's a good name available under the new extensions that fits your brand, and your options with .com's are bad, then it may be worth a shot. I certainly wouldn't dissuade someone from locking down a name under the next extensions, if the cost is reasonable. I'm just not sure I'd bet anything on the new extensions being an SEO boon.

Agreed with Chris that some context would help. This is a big, complex decision, and it's tough to judge link quality without seeing the links. My gut feeling is that a bunch of foreign Blogspot dofollow links probably are spammy, but there's a big difference between fixing a link-based penalty, preventing one, and just taking a hatchet to your links.

Agreed about treading carefully, but you can disavow subdomains. This is from Google's post when they launched disavow:

Q: Can I disavow something.example.com to ignore only links from that subdomain?

A: For the most part, yes. For most well-known freehosts (e.g. wordpress.com, blogspot.com, tumblr.com, and many others), disavowing "domain:something.example.com" will disavow links only from that subdomain. If a freehost is very new or rare, we may interpret this as a request to disavow all links from the entire domain. But if you list a subdomain, most of the time we will be able to ignore links only from that subdomain.

Since they call out Blogspot, I think it's pretty safe.

I'm afraid that Devanur-Rafi is right - you can check for Panda/Penguin (and other named update) impact by lining up traffic drops with known update dates, but there are many, many things that can cause ranking drops that happen outside of named updates. These include manual penalties (check Google Webmaster Tools), technical/crawl issues, and even non-penalty quality issues. Google could filter a page or simply lower your rankings, and it might not align with any known update. If it's algorithmic, you won't get a message.

The key is segmentation:

(1) Which keywords took losses? Are these broad terms or long-tail terms? Is there a pattern? Are you over-optimizing for these terms.

(2) Which pages took losses? Are these pages being indexed? Are they technically sound (returning proper headers, loading quickly, etc.)?

(3) Has something changed in the competitive landscape. In other words, have you dropped or has someone else gone up? The net effect is the same, but the cause is very different. Maybe Google doesn't dislike you - they just like someone else better suddenly.

(4) Is there a seasonal issue? How does this pattern compare to last year? Has something happened in your industry or market?

I know that's a lot, but these are difficult problems without easy answers. I hope that helps a bit.

I will add that it's entirely possible that this is a minor, if odd, problem, and Google is crawling the pages fine. You seem to be indexed properly. Fixing it is a nice-to-have, but I doubt it would be worth a big investment unless you've got other issues that need fixing.

Do you know what kind of hosting you're running with GoDaddy? Is it Apache, Windows, etc.? I used to do some hosting with them, and I'm trying to remember where that would be set. It depends completely on the web server, though.

Unfortunately, this is a server-side issue, so the fix is completely different depending on your setup. Basically, the server is trying to compress your pages, most likely (using something like Gzip), and the settings are probably wrong. So, the final encoding isn't quite right.

At first, I was going to say that our crawler might just be finicky on this one, but when I try to load these pages on Google Chrome, I get a temporary error, after which the page loads. This definitely could be causing you some problems.

I tried to check out your setup with BuiltWith, but it's actually choking on the Gzip errors, too:

http://builtwith.com/sussexchef.com

Step 1 might be to just shut the compression/encoding off, and then try to work out the settings. You're probably going to have to pull in your hosting company and/or developer.

I don't believe domain age is directly factored into DA at all. Of course, it's not uncommon for older sites to have more links, more substantive content, etc., but that's purely a correlation. If you registered a domain 5 years ago and just launched the site yesterday with one page and no links, that site will still have no authority.

Unfortunately, there is no officially sanctioned method for blocking just a portion of a page from the index. As others have mentioned, there are tricks that might do it, but their effectiveness is inconsistent, and most of them will run the risk that Google could treat it as a red flag of some sort. More often, the results just end up being unpredictable (especially with JavaScript) and end up causing additional grief for your developers and visitors.

Most of the time, if you're dealing with substantial amounts of content you don't want indexed, I'd look for other solutions, such as grouping that content or making sure more of your content on any given page is unique. Unfortunately, that depends a lot on why you want it blocked, so it's hard to give a one-size-fits-all answer.

My gut feeling is that Google is doing the same thing to the BBB entry (re-writing, that is) and not that BBB is the cause, but it's a little hard to separate.

It's definitely odd. I am seeing some evidence of bad data in DMOZ:

http://www.dmoz.org/search?q=acme+stove

...so I'd definitely try Meta NOODP (). Sometimes, it can shake that stuff loose.

What's weird, though, is that Google is crossing that same bad title into your listing on other sites. For example running an exact match search for ("acme stove & video") and Google is putting that title on the BBB listings, even though it doesn't appear on those pages either. It is possibly that it's bleeding over from a bad local listing or something in the Knowledge Base, but that won't usually impact title tag rewrites.

Your home-page title tag is a bit keyword-heavy, which doesn't help. It's basically:

"Product Location | Product & Product Location"

...and doesn't even mention your brand. Unfortunately, that reads a little spammy, and that makes Google more inclined to do a rewrite. I'd personally tone it down a bit and get the brand in there.

Unfortunately, these situations can be very difficult to diagnose without a ton of details. I will say this, though, and I know it's a hard thing for many people to hear. Negative SEO is very rarely effective unless there's already an underlying problem. It may not be a deliberate ("blackhat" SEO) kind of thing, but for a negative SEO attempt to succeed it could mean that:

(1) There were issues with your link profile you are unaware of. This could even be a handful of links that violate a specific guideline and that are easy to overlook. Remember, it's about Google's perception of quality, not yours (and their perception wins).

(2) There's some technical issue (say a crawl issue or large-scale duplicate content) that's make you more vulnerable.

(3) There's a content quality issue on some part of the site that's harming the rest of the site.

Dig deep, because it's easy to see some errant 3rd-party links and assume that's the entire problem but in 95%+ of cases, it isn't.

If it's really 100% bad links from someone else, disavowing and requesting reconsideration are about your only option, Unfortunately, if it's Penguin, then you have to wait for an update in most cases, and we're many months since the last one. In most cases, though, it's a combination of factors, and you may have control over some of them.

As others have said, that result is not, unfortunately, something you can outrank - it's not organic, and it doesn't have to compete with organic listings. Once Google determines the query requires a definition result, that one-box will be at the top. Why does Google determine this query needs a definition? Unfortunately, we're not entirely sure. It's possible you could do something to influence that decision, such as build a brand so powerful around the keyword that Google shifts the entire query to a different intent. Honestly, though, that's a tall order.

So, what are some more realistic options?

(1) Buy AdWords ads. Yeah, I know it's not the answer you expect from me, but the top 3 ads come above one-boxes (try a search for "assurance" to see what I mean). Sometimes, you do what you gotta do.

(2) Work on mid-tail keywords surrounding that keyword. There are probably variants on "resting" that are more advantageous to rank for and will convert better. If your client isn't a household name, then people searching for "resting" probably aren't looking for them, and this isn't really that great of a keyword to obsess over.

(3) Focus on "brand" signals like social accounts (especially Google+), get yourself into Freebase, and see if it's possible to get some kind of Knowledge Graph entity related to your brand. This is going to take some doing, but it's possible.

Here's the official info on review snippets, if you don't have them set up:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/146645?hl=en

Keep in mind that setting up the microdata is not always sufficient. Google is still going to look at the authority/quality/etc., of the page, and rich snippets are often query-dependent (you don't get them on every search just because you got them on one search). For most sites, though, the microdata is a good start.

The Payday Loan 3.0 update hit around July 12th, but I've heard some chatter about weird referral data going around this month. Some speculated it was certain browsers (IE8?) misreporting and some speculated it was certain mobile devices, but I haven't seen a definitive answer.

Yeah, this is a good starting point. Create a sitemap in GWT with just these pages (it's easier to monitor that way), and re-fetch any specific pages that are critical. You can also build internal links (even temporarily) to kick the crawlers or try promoting some pages via Google+. There's no foolproof method, though - just nudges.

This assumes, of course, that you've corrected the canonical tags. If there shouldn't have been a canonical tag at all, then I'd recommend adding a self-referencing canonical (i.e. one pointing to the page itself). A new canonical tag seems to overwrite an old one better than just removing, at least that's my anecdotal observation.

Unfortunately, it's a bit of a black box right now. The timing is unclear (it's usually not immediate for the information to go from Wikipedia to Freebase to Knowledge Graph), but a couple of notes:

(1) If you can, make a direct edit to Freebase. I'm not sure how/when the Wikipedia to Freebase transfer happens.

(2) Definitely get the information into another source, like Google+. Google seems to look for multiple sources, whenever possible.

Andrew Isidoro has some great posts on the subject (and he's one of the only people writing about it):

http://moz.com/blog/i-am-an-entity-hacking-the-knowledge-graph

I believe the actual calculation comes from Google's internal PR measure, so if you used Toolbar PR, it would be scaled in appropriately. For example, a page with TBPR=4 would only pass 33% more equity than a page with TBPR=3 (if you treat TBPR as linear), whereas it should actually be an order of magnitude higher (we're not sure what power Google uses).

Technically, you can't calculate PR without the entire link-graph, since the maximum values are set from the link graph, and the calculation is iterative. On a small scale, you could just pick a log scale to use and approximate what happens.

I guess I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish. Beyond a tutorial view, so many factors are laid on top of PR, that even if you could calculate the true values, they would only tell you a small part of the story.

Sorry, I'm a little confused - I see dividing by 3 and 2 in the diagram you attached. Are you saying there's somewhere on our site where we're giving the wrong numbers?

Keep in mind that Toolbar PageRank is a 1-10 scale based on a logarithmic transformation of a continuous scale (or at least, one with much more precision). Since PR is probably calculated on that hidden scale, using Toolbar PR in the formula probably doesn't work as intended.

I wouldn't get too hung up on the Moz timeline, since that's only correlated with what Google does, to build a broader model. If Google has crawled/cached the 404 and the page actually is no longer in the index, then that page should stop inheriting and passing link equity. It can get complicated, because sometimes 404s have inbound links and other issues tied to them that can confuse the crawlers. So, I'd say it's situational.

Moz (specifically, OSE) can help you determine what links still exist to those URLs, which really should guide whether you let them stay 404s or 301-redirect them to something relevant. The other aspect of the decision is just whether something relevant exists. If you clearly have built a page to replace the old one then 301-redirect it. If the old page is something that ceased to exist for a reason, then a 404 is probably fine unless that old page had a ton of inbound links. In that case, the 404 has essentially cut off those links.

The problem is that those inbound links are still out there, so it's not that the authority has ceased to exist. It's that you've basically cut the pipe through which the authority flows.

Sorry, I'm a little confused - are you 301'ing to a 404? I'm not really sure I understand the situation.

I think our data is getting refreshed every couple of weeks at this point, but I'm not sure if a 404 will drop a page from MozScape/OSE right away at that point. I suspect 301s may be updated more quickly, since a 404 could be a temporary issue. Once the target of a 301 gets passed the PA, the original page should lose it.

Open Site Explorer can be filtered just to show links that we think pass equity - it's under the [Show] pulldown:

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/

...then set the [to] pulldown to "pages on this root domain".

Sorry, I'm not sure I'm fully understanding what you're looking for (and may have misunderstood), so please feel free to provide more details.

I ran a crawl with Xenu (similar to what Donna did with Screaming Frog), and came across some deep page that may be causing this problem. For example, on this page...

http://www.cryopak.com/en/resources/cryopak-news/anthony-alleva-presenting-temp-maintenance-biopharmaceutical/

...the last link to "phase change material" goes to:

http://www.cryopak.com/product_line/default.aspx?DepartmentId=67

...which then redirects to...

http://www.cryopak.com/en/?DepartmentId=67

It seems like multiple pages share that template, so one canonical tag might clean up a lot. I'd have to understand the site structure a lot better to advise, though. Google doesn't seem to be indexing these URLs, so they probably aren't a huge problem, but they could be diluting your ranking power. It's worth cleaning them up.

EGOL is essentially correct - DA and PA are measures of ranking power, essentially (they both factor in multiple variables), but we don't currently model things like the likelihood of a link to be spammy - although we're working on that. So, it is definitely possible for a site to have high authority in theory but devalued by Google in practice.

It also depends on whether you mean "trust" in a broad sense or specifically something like TrustRank. Our MozTrust metric was intended to approximate TrustRank, which essentially measure how far a site is from a seed set of trusted sites. That's a way we believe Google has quantified "trust" in the past. I don't believe that PA/DA factor in MozTrust, but I'm not entirely sure on that one.

In terms of link value, DA and PA can both matter, and it depends a bit on the situation - even both metrics are only a small piece of the puzzle. If the numbers are similar and low (like 20/34 or 34/20), I wouldn't obsess about it. It's when they differ quite a bit that you might want to consider both. A weak page on a very strong domain or a very strong page on a weak domain both have potential value as link sources.

It can vary quite a bit. The page has to be recrawled/recached, which can take anywhere from hours to weeks, depending on how much authority the page has. That's usually the big delay. After that, Google may on occasion delay passing authority, but we don't have proof of that (there are just cases where it seems like they do).

If it's just a handful of pages, re-fetch them through Google Webmaster Tools. It never hurts to kick the crawlers.

Some valid comments here, but I'd generally have to agree with Ron - IF the domain really has authority (solid, trusted links, isn't spammy, decent traffic, social signals, etc.) and IF that domain is relevant to your topic, then it could give you a solid boost. As @KempRugeLawGroup said, though, there are cases where Google may not pass the authority of the site after an ownership change, especially if you completely overhaul the site and it's an entirely new topic.

Unfortunately, there are no guarantees. A lot of this is at Google's discretion. If you bought a high-authority site about bass fishing and then turned it into an affiliate site for WordPress templates, and the domain was "bobsbassfishing.com" and 80% of the inbound anchor text was "bass fishing", then Google's going to catch on pretty fast. If you actual sell fishing products and keep the brand, but slowly redesign and add new, relevant content, then it's entirely possible that old domain will work in your favor.

If you just buy an old domain and then 301-redirect to a current or new and barely relevant domain, then it's at best a crap-shoot. That game has been played far too much.

I certainly think that gradually adding pages and focusing on quality will help. The problem is that the devil really is in the details. The size of your current site, the type of pages you currently index, your link profile, the type of niche/industry you're in... all of these things matter, to some degree. So, what works for one site might be a problem for another.

Easing into it is definitely going to mitigate your risks, and I think focusing on the most high-impact pages while leaving the other filters/sorts/etc. out of the index is a good idea. Whether this strategy is going to provide real value over the time is the bigger question. Ultimately, I think internal search pages have been devalued a lot, even on reputable sites. I've been through this with a former client - they have a perfectly legitimate business model and provide good value to users, but Google sees them as a directory and much of their index is necessarily search results. Over time, even though they've never been penalized, they've just seen a steady decline, because it takes more than that to rank now.

Generally speaking, Google's view of internal search pages has dimmed over time, and they tend to view them as thin. It used to be common practice to use those pages to rank for category and sub-category terms, but Panda has changed a lot of that.

That's not to say it never works, or that if you add enough unique content, you can't create value. Given that your DA is low, though, and it sounds like all the new content you'd be rolling out would effectively be search results within your own site, I'd be cautious.

Yeah, one thing I think is critically important is to try to divorce yourself from your own creation and think in terms of what Google finds valuable. We all think our sites are the greatest and every page we create is a masterpiece, even when we'd ignore or trash the same kind of page on someone else's site. When you're talking about a 100X increase, brutal honesty with yourself is very important.

There's no one-sized-fits-all answer to this, I'm afraid. Any large-scale change to a site carries risk, and could even look like over-optimization. Even if it's a great, high-quality change, Google may re-evaluate the site, and you could easily see short-term ranking fluctuations. Long-term, you very well might improve, but there is definitely short-term risk.

As Kevin said, my recent post explains the new width guidelines - it's not as simple as one number. I also don't think that falling outside of these guidelines is the kiss of death. It could impact CTR and I wouldn't make a habit of it, but some titles are just naturally longer than others.

It really depends on what the before and after look like, how big your site is, how authoritative your site is, and a lot of things that are hard to dig into on a Public Q&A. Personally, I'd say test it - pick the pages where the change has the most value and the current titles are long and try changing a group of them. See how it goes. Doing it in phases and measuring can help you get a better handle on things and even help you tweak the changes as you see what works and what doesn't.

I'd have to ask about how we specifically measure DA in this case, but the broader answer is "Yes", it can absolutely decrease your authority. There was a time when more pages just mean more opportunities to rank, but that time is long gone, IMO. Even before Panda, there was an increasing risk of dilution - your authority (and even specifically your PageRank) can only spread so thin. If your link profile is relatively weak, and you expand by 100X, each page is going to get less and less authority. You have more theoretical opportunities to rank, but each opportunity has a much smaller chance. Of course, it's more complex than that, but that's the bottom line.

After Panda, the calculation changed a lot. Now, you're not only diluting your content, but if it's thin enough, you risk Google taking action that could harm your entire site. So, EGOL's simple question is critically important. Also, note that "unique" doesn't not mean valuable in Google's eyes (or search users). It's easy to string words together to create something unique, but if that's not adding value it may still be seen as "thin".

Our data on eBay can fluctuate a bit, since both the main domain and "popular.ebay.com" occupy a lot of real-estate, and seem to shuffle around. Historically, though, this is a big drop for a "Big 10" property.

I think the SSL thing is more Matt's personal crusade than a near-term change coming from Google, but it's hard to say. I suspect it's too early for that, personally.

Posted some preliminary findings on Google+:

https://plus.google.com/b/112544075040456048636/+SEOmoz/posts/Tj2H3QDwX56

TLDR - definitely seeing unusual activity, and it doesn't seem to be a glitch. The last week we saw historic lows, so the contrast is very telling. It might be that Google kept changes light before rolling out something major.

I can confirm EGOL's observation that eBay took a big hit (also mentioned in the G+ post). This is unprecedented for a "Big 10" site, but it could well be temporary. An eBay-sized site moving in the SERPs that far could move the overall needle a bit, but I don't think it's the whole situation.

This feels more Penguin-like than Panda-like, but that's just my gut, and I think we have to be careful putting everything into those two buckets. With in the ballpark of 600 updates/year, there's a lot more than Panda and Penguin. If it's Penguin, we may yet hear confirmation from Google. If it's Panda, we probably won't.

I suspect we count each character as just one character, so we'd see your title as six characters long. Since most "words" in Chinese are 1-2 characters long (I speak a tiny bit of Mandarin, poorly), it's fair to say that this guideline isn't going to be very useful. Generally, a title being too short is just a heads up - it's not the kiss of death, but something you might want to consider.

Yeah, like Miriam, I feel like I'm not understanding some key aspects of this situation. Why is the old site still live. How different is the new site? How is the old site being used?

My bigger concern, from a traditional SEO standpoint, would be that the old site might have pages/assets/etc. that are duplicates and could harm content on the new site. It's hard for me to see how the new site could be completely different and still be the same core business, honestly. In terms of the phone number, though, I don't think Google really associates that with any kind of spam or malware signal. The fact that the phone number is on another site probably isn't going to harm your new site, in a core SEO sense.

If the owners of the old domain started to generally make trouble and try to ruin your reputation, then having people connect the number to you wouldn't be great. Again, I'm not clear on how bad the situation is. It's remotely possible Google could use the phone number to connect the sites, in the sense of seeing them as owned by the same people, but I think that's far-fetched. That would probably only come into play with something like a link network.

So, short answer is that I think the risk is small, but I hesitate to say that decisively without knowing more.

It's really tough to say, but moving away from "Let Google decide" to a more definitive choice seems like a good next step. You know which URL should be canonical, and it's not the parameterized version (if I'm understanding correctly).

If you say "Let Google decide", it seems a bit more like rel=prev/next. Google may allow any page in the set to rank, BUT they won't treat those pages as duplicates, etc. How does this actually impact the PR flow to any given page in that series? We have no idea. They're probably consolidating them on the fly, to some degree. They basically have to be, since the page they choose to rank form the set is query-dependent.

I generally wouldn't NOINDEX something that's part of your navigation structure, unless it's a deep layer (and you want to cut off anything "below" it). If you're concerned that they don't have search value, I'd consider consolidating somehow, which I thought was the general plan from the original question. I just don't know that you need all of the content or to get too complicated with the consolidation.

Yeah, I don't think the picture- and video-heavy pages are going to rank all that well by themselves. It's just a question of whether those additional pages are diluting your MLS listing pages (by using similar regional keywords, etc.).

At the scale of a large site, it's hard to tell without understanding the data, including where your traffic is coming from. If it's producing value (traffic, links, etc.), great. If not, then you may want to revisit whether those pages are worth having and/or can be combined somehow. I don't think "combined" means everything on both pages gets put onto one mega-page - you could pick and choose at that point.

The Penguin refresh comments, on my part, have been entirely speculative. It's hard to believe Google would go that long without some kind of data refresh on something with such wide repercussions. On the other hand, the data so far seems to suggest that that is what they're doing. I have no credible evidence, other than my own disbelief, that a site hit by Penguin can escape Penguin outside of a confirmed update.

I hate being at Google's mercy for knowing when updates happen, and I do believe that Penguin will be more tightly integrated over time, but I also am fairly sure that Penguin had wide-ranging collateral damage that Google didn't entirely foresee. I think they're still trying to wrestle the Penguin update themselves.

So, for now, the best evidence I have is that the only Penguin updates are the ones we know about. I can't prove it either way. I definitely don't think it's like Panda. I wonder if they occasionally do smaller data-only refreshes on Penguin, but I can't back that up.

That depends on a lot of factors. Consolidating those to one page has advantages, SEO-wise, but you're losing the benefits of the photo page. I lean toward consolidation, but it really depends on how the pages are structured in the navigation, what sort of content and meta-data they have, etc. I'm not clear on what's left on Page A currently, but the biggest issue is probably dilution from the extra pages. Since there are "guide" pages, though, I'm not sure how they fit your site architecture. To remove 200 of them, you may need to also rethink your internal link structure.

That's a trick that used to occasionally work, but there's no evidence for it in the past couple of years. Google has gotten pretty good at understand how pages are rendered and is no longer completely dependent on source-code order. In some cases, they may even view it as manipulative.

I think some of this is a legacy from Private Q&A days, when we tried to make sure that every question had a resolution, as opposed to being an open discussion. Even now, though, it's partly a "housekeeping" issue - if we see a question that's 80-90% resolved and mark it "answered", we have a better sense of where to prioritize our efforts and serve the questions that have no answers or bad answers.

Unfortunately, it's also complicated by 30-day trials and people who ask opportunistically and then disappear. We've always struggled with how to filter that kind of question while serving our long-term members better.

Even when doing it, there are times when I know that the original author may not feel the situation is fully resolved. So, it's a balancing act of empathy toward the author vs. empathy toward the pool of all authors. It's an imperfect solution and I think it's definitely something we have to revisit from time to time. I would only argue that leaving everything "open" has down-sides as well (as we've seen in the past).

Edit: Reading this back, it feels a bit defensive, and I don't mean it that way. Sorting out how to balance this all has been an ongoing discussion for us for years, and I think it's absolutely valuable when people tell us what they're feeling about the process out loud. I'm just not sure there's a simple answer.