From your perspective, what's wrong with this site such that it has a Panda Penalty?
-
For more background, please see:
http://www.seomoz.org/q/advice-regarding-panda
http://www.seomoz.org/q/when-panda-s-attack
(hoping the third time's the charm here)
-
Its cool, your previous questions didn't really get answered... and my answer was posted twice so above is the edited one. Whoops!
-
- Light content is an issue for many pages by the nature of the content. This is why we moved the entire Citations section to a sub domain. Combining them would be near impossible without diminishing the value to the human visitors - lawyers rarely have time to wade through arbitrary lists. I really can't think of a way to combine the page in a meaningfull way.
We have combined other areas such as the law quotations and I will search for more canditates.
I will note, pages below a certain character threshold have a noindex tag on them now.
-
Above.
-
Actually, the pages have around 35 links per page according to GoogleBot. The menu and the footer are loaded via AJAX after the visitor interacts with the site. The home page is an anomaly.
-
Hehe, caught me.
Just, duplicate content isn't that big a factor for Panda that I can see. It appears focus on the quality of the content (as judge by humans in a study).
It may well be hurting the site in general however.
-
Speaking of duplicate content...
-
I imagine there are a few potential causes:
1. Light content. You can fix this by combining the pages for terms together, and using anchor tags to point the user down where they want to go. On your front page include more of the post - right now it seems like the intro blurb is only several words long.
2. Duplicated widely. You mentioned this in another question, and I'm not sure what else to do here. You're already using rel canonical which would be my advice.
3. Tons of links on every page. Your footer has a ton of links, and the menu is quite large to begin with. Consider removing most or all of those footer links.
Best of luck!
-
The site is a legal dictionary and reference so literally,1000's of legal definitions, topics and terms.
A targeted case would be made for "Legal Dictionary" but the site still gets OK results from that search. It was much better before Panda - most keywords are off by about 60% in terms of traffic
-
What are you trying to rank for?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What's the best way to integrate off site inventory?
I can't seem to make any progress with my car dealership client in rankings or traffic. I feel like I've narrowed out most of the common problems, the only other thing I can see is that all their inventory is on a subdomain using a dedicated auto dealership software. Any suggestion of a better way to handle this situation? Am I missing something obvious? The url is rcautomotive.com Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | GravitateOnline0 -
What am I doing wrong?
Hi Moz Community ! I am a student and I started working for a startup. I'm really new to SEO and I've been reading tones of ressources and spent days and days learning the basics. I am currently in charge of the SEO (blog and homepage), and tried hard to optimize it. However, I don't see results. What am I doing wrong? And it's really frustrating because I am really passionate about SEO. I find it really challenging ! I have a few concerns: I try to provide high quality content but why don't I rank better for few keywords? (I don't see any improvement) I optimize the content, images etc so it's as SEO friendly as possible (keyword density, alt tags, titles, etc). But seems something is wrong. I did a log of blog commenting with High quality and genuine comments (useful to users of course). And now trying to get some articles out as guest posts for backlinks. Fyi, I am using Moz and Yoast, the blog is in Wordpress. And we are moving to subfolder instead of subdomain for the blog. I would appreciate your help and any tip. Thanks !
Technical SEO | | CarolineLee1 -
GWT returning 200 for robots.txt, but it's actually returning a 404?
Hi, Just wondering if anyone has had this problem before. I'm just checking a client's GWT and I'm looking at their robots.txt file. In GWT, it's saying that it's all fine and returns a 200 code, but when I manually visit (or click the link in GWT) the page, it gives me a 404 error. As far as I can tell, the client has made no changes to the robots.txt recently, and we definitely haven't either. Has anyone had this problem before? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | White.net0 -
Duplicate Content - What's the best bad idea?
Hi all, I have 1000s of products where the product description is very technical and extremely hard to rewrite or create an unique one. I'll probably will have to use the contend provided by the brands, which can already be found in dozens of other sites. My options are: Use the Google on/off tags "don't index
Technical SEO | | Carlos-R
" Put the content in an image Are there any other options? We'd always write our own unique copy to go with the technical bit. Cheers0 -
If you are organizing the site structure for an ecommerce site, how would you do it?
Should you use not use slashes and use all dashes or use just a few slashes and the rest with dashes? For example, domain.com/category/brand/product-color-etc OR domain.com/anythinghere-color-dimensions-etc Which structure would you rather go for and why?
Technical SEO | | Zookeeper0 -
WMT - Googlebot can't access your site
Hi On our new website which is just a few weeks old upon logging into Webmaster tools I am getting the following message Googlebot can't access your site - The overall error rate for DNS queries is 50% What do I need to do to resolve this, I have never had this problem before with any of the sites - where the domains are with Fasthosts (UK) and hosting is with Dreamhosts. What is the recommended course of action Google mention contacting your host in my case Dreamhost - but what do you need to ask them in a support ticket. When doing a fetch in WMT the fetch status is a success?
Technical SEO | | ocelot0 -
Why do I have one page showing as two url's?
My SEOMoz stats show that I have duplicate titles for the following two url's: http://www.rmtracking.com/products.php and http://www.rmtracking.com/products I have checked my server files, and I don't see a live page without the php. A while back, we converted our site from html to php, but the html pages have 301's and as you can see the page without the php is properly redirecting to the php page. Any ideas why this would show as two separate url's?
Technical SEO | | BradBorst0