I've done fairly well over my time on Moz to not respond to some people the way I would really like to respond to them. I've deleted and rewritten my reply twice three four five times and spent well over an hour on this reply to make sure my reputation for helpfulness and intelligent commentary stays intact.
The funny part is even now, I'm torn between my compulsion to help you and the condescension and arrogance of your reply. I need to start by addressing a few things you said.
"Will they look similar to other law sites - yes.That's because the law is the same. The terms of art used will be the same. So will the general content. I don't blame you for thinking this at first glance as I'm familiar with my own niche."
"I think the most often parroted phrase is "Google obsesses about this and that" - I think it's a great selling phrase to say you've gotta hire me because you have to sweat even the smallest stuff. But hey, I know what you're trying to say. :)"
You've very wrongly assumed that you know who I am or that you somehow understand us "parrots." You claimed I don't understand your niche enough to know what duplicate articles look like and you call my language "a great selling phrase" and that I've said anywhere in my reply that "you've gotta hire me."
I know lawyers love to distinguish between fact and law, so let me clear a few facts up for you.
Fact: I graduated law school in 2002. I can read your articles just fine thankyouverymuch. In fact, I ran a site exactly like yours. I was the original co-owner of legalese.ca when my at-the-time girlfriend was studying law as well. Not only do I understand your niche, I was running a similar site over 10 years ago. When we saw what findlaw was doing at the time, we knew 2 of us couldn't compete.
When I said your articles were being spun, I did what most half-intelligent SEOs do and copied text in quotes. I'm not guessing at this. I didn't say it because it sounded like something SEOs say. I put sentences into Google in quotes. It returns exact matches - you don't need to have a copy of Black's on your desk to understand that.
Fact: I have turned down more work in the last 8 weeks than I've taken in the last 6 months. I'm not after your business and wouldn't take it if you paid me. We're in the middle of a web redesign, I just hired 2 new people I'm working on training, I have an intern starting soon, and I haven't had time to blog in 3 months. And you think I'm on Moz begging for work? Fact: I'm already on page 1 of Moz users and have answered more questions than all but 2 (maybe 3) SEOs in the last 9 months. I wouldn't be on here still answering yours if my intent was to tell you to hire me. I've done far more than enough to gain a few quick clients from Moz.
Now because I can't help myself, I'm going to tell you more about your SEO issues because I LIKE TO HELP. I'm going to be a whole lot more blunt, though, because honestly you've quite irritated me.
Fact: Your backlink profile sucks. I don't care why, honestly. I sorted your OpenSiteExplorer link export by Anchor text, removed 10 or so links of the top 50 and this is what we find:
http://www.highonseo.com/examples/lawlinks.jpg
2 pages of malware, 6 automatic forwards, 5 links not found, a scraper, 14 spam links, 1 comment that links to your site in at least five ways, and a partridge in a pear tree. Again, I did remove about 10 legitimate links from this list. So out of your top 50, about 40 are junk. Let's say I picked a bad batch and 80% of your links don't suck. At least 40% of your links suck.
Fact: Your site has duplication issues. This is a fact. Somewhere in this mess is your "atomic bomb."
http://www.highonseo.com/examples/lawgangnam.jpg
Look at the results Google returned. 1, 2, 6 and 8 are exactly the same link, yes? Why would Google return the same link FOUR times? Not variations of your link - THE. SAME. LINK.
The permalink for this result is http://www.thelaw.com/journal/the-personal-injury-shuffle-post-harlem-shake-gangnam-style-10067/
That link is the one without a description because (in Google's words) "A description for this result is not available because of the site's robots.txt"
Please point out to me where http://www.thelaw.com/robots.txt blocks /journal/ It doesn't, does it? So why does Google say it does?
Not all duplicate content presents the same way. This mysterious glitch you've been looking for? Find the problem with your robots.txt file - maybe you'll find it.
Fact: SEO is made of up hundreds of small ranking factors. I pointed out several to you - most of which you summarily dismissed. Yes, one small change won't automatically fix all your issues. TEN may help. I pointed out the first 7 of about 25 things I saw wrong with your site. Lawyers are taught to sweat the small stuff yet you are blowing off all the small things to look for "one big glitch." (Which you also blew off as SEO-speak.)
Fact: Your "Contact" and "Help" pages are identical. Maybe you meant for one of them to link to http://www.thelaw.com/support/submitticket.php but it doesn't. These are your footer links:
http://www.thelaw.com/support/index.php?_m=tickets&_a=submit
http://www.thelaw.com/support/
When you open them in separate tabs and then swap between the two, there's absolutely no difference.
Fact: Your suggestion that some glitch has "dropped an atomic bomb" on your site is incorrect. The title of your forum is
<title>Legal Advice Forums</title>
You rank #3 on page 1 for this term. That's not exactly getting slammed by Google.
Fact: Subdomains are treated as separate for SEO purposes. You have a site-wide link to a subdomain in every menu. (lawyers.thelaw.com, forms.thelaw.com, dictionary.thelaw.com) I'm sure you'll tell me this doesn't hurt you so let me cut you off at the pass.
http://moz.com/community/q/subdomains-vs-subfolders#reply_65636
Rand says:
- Subdomains SOMETIMES inherit and pass link/trust/quality/ranking metrics between one another
- Subfolders ALWAYS inherit and pass link/trust/quality/ranking metrics across the same subdomain
Quick facts:
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Pagerank is not a valid metric for measuring your site in 2013.
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+1s drop off and reappear on pages literally every day. Sometimes for technical reasons, sometimes because they're spam to begin with, sometimes because Google updates something and you don't. Search "google +1s missing" without quotes.
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Old links deprecate in value. Most of your links were built using old school methods, whether there was a campaign or not. Blog comments, forum profiles, article links on ezine, 123freedirectories, and very irrelevant citations, as well as automatically redirected links, malware and link pages not being found. Old links fade out in value. Your AHREFS report would suggest that you're losing backlinks pretty fast:
https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/overview/subdomains/www.thelaw.com