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
-
Drupal's Yoast
Hi. I'm wondering if anyone knows of an equivalent to Yoast for Drupal sites? Is there such a thing? I've been asked whether I could optimize a Drupal site and am wondering if the guiding principles and techniques I use for HTML and Wordpress sites can be easily transferred to a Drupal implementation, or whether I might be setting myself (and the client!) up for failure. Any observations or advice would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | DonnaDuncan0 -
What's wrong with this robots.txt
Hi. really struggling with the robots.txt file
Technical SEO | | Leonie-Kramer
this is it: User-agent: *
Disallow: /product/ #old sitemap
Disallow: /media/name.xml When testing in w3c.org everything looks good, testing is okay, but when uploading it to the server, Google webmaster tools gives 3 errors. Checked it with my collegue we both don't know what's wrong. Can someone take a look at this and give me the solution.
Thanx in advance! Leonie1 -
How Does Google's "index" find the location of pages in the "page directory" to return?
This is my understanding of how Google's search works, and I am unsure about one thing in specific: Google continuously crawls websites and stores each page it finds (let's call it "page directory") Google's "page directory" is a cache so it isn't the "live" version of the page Google has separate storage called "the index" which contains all the keywords searched. These keywords in "the index" point to the pages in the "page directory" that contain the same keywords. When someone searches a keyword, that keyword is accessed in the "index" and returns all relevant pages in the "page directory" These returned pages are given ranks based on the algorithm The one part I'm unsure of is how Google's "index" knows the location of relevant pages in the "page directory". The keyword entries in the "index" point to the "page directory" somehow. I'm thinking each page has a url in the "page directory", and the entries in the "index" contain these urls. Since Google's "page directory" is a cache, would the urls be the same as the live website (and would the keywords in the "index" point to these urls)? For example if webpage is found at wwww.website.com/page1, would the "page directory" store this page under that url in Google's cache? The reason I want to discuss this is to know the effects of changing a pages url by understanding how the search process works better.
Technical SEO | | reidsteven750 -
Different IP's in one Server
Hi, I just want to ask if there is no bad effect in SEO if we do have different websites that has different IP address but has shared in only 1 server? Thank you
Technical SEO | | TirewebMarketing0 -
My site was hammered by this last update -- I'm freaking out -- what now
I looked at my seomoz report yesterday, almost all my money keywords went to hell. When I was looking at the graph for one of my keywords it looked so depressing I don't think I can look at it again. The funny thing is that my competitors have bunch of low quality links on unrelated websites and they haven't been touched. How to approach this problem, I'm scared to do anything at this point.
Technical SEO | | Tolod0 -
Google Panda and ticketing sites: quality of content
Hi from Madrid! I am managing the Marketing Department of a ticketing site in Europe similar to Stubhub.com. We have thousands of events and, until now, we used templates for their descriptions. A lot of events share the same description with minor changes. They also have a lot of tickets on sale, so that's unique content different on each event. Now the last Google Panda update hit Europe and I was wondering if that will affect us a lot. It's hard to tell for now, because we are in the middle of the summer and the volume of searches in our industry depends decreases a lot during this time of the year. I know that ideally we should have unique descriptions but that would need a lot of resources and they are not important for our users: they just want to know the venue, the time and the price of the tickets! Have you experienced something about Google Panda update with a similar site or with another e-commerce industry? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | jorgediaz0 -
Google.ca is showing our US site instead of our Canada Site
When our Canadian users who search on google.ca for our brand (e.g. Travelocity, Travelocity hotels, etc.), the first few results our from our US site (travelocity.com) rather than our Canadian site (travelocity.ca). In Google Webmaster Tools, we've adjusted the geotargeting settings to focus on the appropriate locale, but the wrong country TLD is still coming up at the top via google.ca. What's the best way to ensure our Canadian site comes up instead of the US site on google.ca? Thanks, Tory Smith
Technical SEO | | travelocitysearch
Travelocity0
