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
-
Why don't sites using Drupal have keywords
Why don't the vast majority of sites using Drupal list keywords in the head section? Is there another convention used in Drupal that serves the same purpose for SEO? I noticed most of the Drupal info pages about keywords seem to drop off around 2010
Technical SEO | | fxarechiga0 -
Generation 'child' sitemaps?
First off, am I correct in thinking that a 'child' sitemap is a sitemap of a subfolder and everything that sits under it, i.e. www.example.com/example If so, can someone give me a good recommendation for generation a free child sitemap please? Many thanks, Rhys
Technical SEO | | SwanseaMedicine0 -
Link's that are an internal site search?
Hi hope your're all well. I sell Red, Blue, Green Widgets within each color I have many sub types, the subtypes change all the time,and a sub type has many variations in itself. I'd like to set up links that direct customers to popular searches of sub types say: widgets.com/red/blue-spots....search string... Will Google crawl these search links and see that there is good content behind it? How does Google handle links that are also a site search? Can it be bad and should I "no follow" them? Hope someone can give me some direction on these, many thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | Thea880 -
Does my "spam" site affect my other sites on the same IP?
I have a link directory called Liberty Resource Directory. It's the main site on my dedicated IP, all my other sites are Addon domains on top of it. While exploring the new MOZ spam ranking I saw that LRD (Liberty Resource Directory) has a spam score of 9/17 and that Google penalizes 71% of sites with a similar score. Fair enough, thin content, bunch of follow links (there's over 2,000 links by now), no problem. That site isn't for Google, it's for me. Question, does that site (and linking to my own sites on it) negatively affect my other sites on the same IP? If so, by how much? Does a simple noindex fix that potential issues? Bonus: How does one go about going through hundreds of pages with thousands of links, built with raw, plain text HTML to change things to nofollow? =/
Technical SEO | | eglove0 -
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 -
How to handle URL's from removed products?
Hi All, I have a question about a fashion related webshop. Every month about 100 articles are removed and about the some amouth is added to the site. Most of the products are indexed on brandname and type (e.g. MyBrand t-shirt blue) My question is what to do with the URL / page after the product is removed. I'm thinking about a couple of solutions: 301 the page to the brand categorie page build a script which shows related articles on the old URL (and try to keep it indexed) 404 page optimized for search term with links to brand category any other suggestons? Thanks in advance, Sam
Technical SEO | | U-Digital0 -
A sitemap... What's the purpose?
Hello everybody, my question is really simple: what's the purpose of a sitemap? It's to help the robots to crawl your website but if you're website has a good architecture, the robots will be able to crawl your site easily! Am I wrong? Thank you for yours answers, Jonathan
Technical SEO | | JonathanLeplang0
