It will likely be a few months at least before we can broaden outside the US, and maybe some more before we get to non-English languages. Sorry about that! We will get there; just need to do a lot of work to make it happen.

Hi Greg - totally hear you, but strongly, strongly disagree

I worked personally on the scores for both and I can promise that the old KW Difficulty tool's numbers just aren't right. The old tool frequently over or understates the difficulty of ranking, and it relies on metrics that are outdated (age of domain? yech). I would strongly advise you to switch to using the metrics from KW Explorer. They're more accurate, the spread is better (the old KW Difficulty tool scrunches up scores so almost everything is between 30-70, when it really should be a wider spread), the other metrics are way more useful (CTR % and volume), and the accuracy of the metrics fetches is solid too (sometimes, old KW Difficulty doesn't even grab data correctly).

A few examples:

• "Harry Potter" - old tool says 80, KW Explorer says 89 (not a huge difference, but you can see what I mean about the scrunching effect -- clearly this KW should be one of the highest difficulties possible)
• "calendar app" - old tool says 62, KW Explorer says 76 (on a hand review, I think we'd all agree 76 is far more accurate; this is a very tough keyword)
• "northwest moss garden examples" - old tool says 47, KW Explorer says 33 (this is one of the easier keywords out there, with lots of low DA sites in the results; I think 33 is far more indicative of reality)

I know it's tough to make a switch or trust something new, but having studied these both closely and worked on the design of the metrics and data for both, I can assure you KW Explorer's Difficulty metrics are head and shoulders above the old tool.

Hi Dean - not sure we could (or would want to) segment Q+A or the blog/YOUmoz to create a sub-section specifically about sites being penalized by Google spam updates. However, it sounds like some folks in this thread, like Georg below, may take this upon themselves (which is awesome).

Little known story - SEOmoz's more prominent focus on community began in earnest after a large exodus of members from another forum way back in 2004.

You might also check out http://flippa.com. Just be careful with buying expired domains, presuming that PA/DA may still be preserved. Google is actually taking a lot of steps to reset a site's authority/link profile on change of ownership to prevent manipulation through expired/sold domains.

Hi Donna - yes, that fluctuation should be much larger on average in the tail of the web (sites with DA 0-40) than in the middle or head. This makes sense because with a relative metric, all of the factors I describe above are going to be magnified in the tail, particularly because Google's rankings change so much there and because just a few links can have such a huge impact. For metrics-savvy clients, they should be best poised to understand that since DA/PA are exponential, a few links here or there and a few valuation shifts on those links can have big swings in the 10-40 point ranges of DA/PA, whereas in the 50/60+ ranges, small shifts in link discovery or in link valuation (from us or Google) won't have as much change.

As far as a ceiling - no, we don't have a recommendation there. The idea is that as DA/PA fluctuate, especially as they get more accurate in predicting rankings (correlations & coverage), the fluctuations are generally happening because Google's changing and we're getting closer to tracking how and where (with exceptions I noted above around issues with our crawl/indexing). My biggest recommendation is to keep track of similar-sized competitors (and larger/smaller ones) so you've got a set of benchmarks for comparison.

Thanks for the note and apologies for the frustrations this causes.

Yeah - I'd say the inability to customize the titles and meta descriptions is a dealbreaker by itself. That said, it shouldn't be impacting indexing -- could be that Google's crawled those pages but determined they don't have enough unique content, enough link equity, enough positive user/usage signals, or a combination of these, to keep in the main index.

At this point, though, I would probably consider migrating. Wordpress is still my first choice for the customization abilities, but Hubspot's a good one, too.

I don't know... There's a surprising number of people who've reported hearing Matt say things. Yet, somehow, whenever there's video of him, he magically says next to nothing. I'd be skeptical at best.

Since the full-fledged version is very significant, I've asked the team to come up with a mimimum solution; possibly just another list without comment/submissions functionality. I hope to have that up very soon (possibly even just as an Excel download or Google Docs accessible with a password.

Agree with Patrick - those resources should help and in general, I'd bias to merging the sites. You may even lose out short term, but long term, you'll almost certainly be better off focusing your efforts and energy, and earning the branding benefits of a single site and name.

Hi Gyorgy - you can use the old KW Difficulty tool, but the search volumes there aren't accurate for non-US either, and the difficulty scores are less accurate, too. I'd suggest using KW Explorer if you want all the other scores (those are accurate) and AdWords KW Planner in the meantime.

We're prioritizing UK, Canada, and Australia volume data very soon - hopefully will be in the product in the next 60 days.

Kris - awesome that you "rand" some tests. I like to do that myself

One thing we've been noticing is that sites with very aggressive ads (AdSense, overlays, display, etc.) seem unusually hard hit, while content farms that are less agro on that front weren't. Maybe a user/usage data thing?

It's weird that the bot is accepting cookies, but with a bounce rate that high, I agree it's probably something automated (though it could be people who were looking for something else or were directed there by an email or an app accidentally). You can look through your logs to see IP addresses and then do as Atakala says and block the traffic if you're worried about bandwidth. You can also just filter it out in GA by excluding US traffic (if your'e worried about analytics being messed up).