Always happy to help, and especially to provide transparency. Thanks for the kind response

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.

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

I have to agree with Russ. I think the old KW Difficulty model was making that keyword look stronger than it is, and the new one, while maybe a bit low, is more accurate. I'd also suggest, as Pete did, that using any keyword in isolation is unwise. Compare scores for similar terms you might target in the same sector, against the same sorts of competitors, and use that relative data -- KW Difficulty, and indeed PA, DA, and keyword volume, are all far more useful as comparative metrics than absolute ones.

A) Generally yes, but hard to say for certain. There are correlations suggesting that maybe some of them do pass influence in some way.

B) Probably, but again, likely based on engagement, i.e. if a social link gets very little engagement, it probably won't do much to influence search rankings, but if it gets a lot, it often seems to have at least some positive impact.

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 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.