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
-
Redirects and site map isn't showing
We had a malware hack and spent 3 days trying to get Bluehost to fix things. Since they have made changes 2 things are happening: 1. Our .xml sitemap cannot be created https://www.caffeinemarketing.co.uk/sitmap.xml we have tried external tools 2. We had 301 redirects from the http (www and non www versions) nad the https;// (non www version) throughout the whole website to https://www.caffeinemarketing.co.uk/ and subsequent pages Whilst the redirects seem to be happening, when you go into the tools such as https://httpstatus.io every version of every page is a 200 code only whereas before ther were showing the 301 redirects Have Bluehost messed things up? Hope you can help thanks
Technical SEO | | Caffeine_Marketing0 -
Godaddy and Soft 404's
Hello, We've found that a website we manage has a list of not-found URLS in Google webmaster tools which are "soft 404's " according to Google. I went to the hosting company GoDaddy to explain and to see what they could do. As far as I can see GoDaddy's server are responding with a 200 HTTP error code - meaning that the page exists and was served properly. They have sort of disowned this as their problem. Their server is not serving up a true 404 response. This is a WordPress site. 1) Has anyone seen this problem before with GoDaddy?Is it a GoDaddy problem?2) Do you know a way to sort this issue? When I use the command site:mydomain.co.uk the number of URLs indexed is about right except for 2 or 3 "soft URLs" . So I wonder why webmaster tools report so many yet I can't see them all in the index?
Technical SEO | | AL123al0 -
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 -
404's in WMT are old pages and referrer links no longer linking to them.
Within the last 6 days, Google Webmaster Tools has shown a jump in 404's - around 7000. The 404 pages are from our old browse from an old platform, we no longer use them or link to them. I don't know how Google is finding these pages, when I check the referrer links, they are either 404's themselves or the page exists but the link to the 404 in question is not on the page or in the source code. The sitemap is also often referenced as a referrer but these links are definitely not in our sitemap and haven't been for some time. So it looks to me like the referrer data is outdated. Is that possible? But somehow these pages are still being found, any ideas on how I can diagnose the problem and find out how google is finding them?
Technical SEO | | rock220 -
When rankings dip what's the best diagnostic procedure?
Bonjourno from 10 degrees C lighly raining Wetherby UK 🙂 Every so often SEO feels like a game of snakes & ladders. One minute your rankings go up and then then within the click of a mouse they drop back down. Like a Greek play you begin to feel our mortal lives as SEO pundits is controlled by the Google Gods. A case in point is illustrated here in this graph:
Technical SEO | | Nightwing
http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/lincoln-drop_zpseeb04690.jpg Now if i want to explain why the rapid dip has occured for target term "Lincoln Solicitors" here's is what i'd do: 1. Go to webmaster tools and check for crawl errors 2. See if a Google algo change has changed the rules of engagment 3. Check another site administrator hasnt tinkered with the original layout But i wonder what process do other SEO practitioners follow to explain to a disgruntled client - "Why have my rankings that i pay you to look after nose dived?" Any insights welcome:-)0 -
Will changing our colocation affect our site's link juice?
If we change our site's server location to a new IP, will this affect anything involving SEO? The site name and links will not be changing.
Technical SEO | | 9Studios0 -
I have a WordPress site with 30 + categories and about 2k tags. I'd like to bring that number down for each taxonomy. What is the proper practice to do that?
I want to bring my categories down to about 8 or so and the tags... They're just a mess and I'd really like to bring that figure down significantly and setup a standard for usage. My thought was to remove the un-needed tags and categories and setup 301 redirects for the ones that I'm removing. Is that even necessary? Are there tools that can assist with this? What are the "gotchas" I should be aware of? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | digisavvy1 -
Basically duplicate sites that act like they're two different businesses. How do they not get dinged?
I bought supplies recently at barcodesinc.com. While searching I noticed it is clearly the same site as barcodediscount.com. How do they not get hurt by duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | jotham20
