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Our website recently suffered from a penguin update courtesy of some black hat techniques used by an SEO company we hired a few years ago.  We are working on cleaning up and disavowing the old spammy links, but at the same time this penalty has hit us while we were working on making some major changes to our website.

As a law firm we have 2 separate practice websites we are planning to merge under 1 domain to help boost our local results.  Our problem is that the domain names for each practice are specific to the type of law they practice, so we will have to move both practices to a branded name domain that works for both practices.

I thought since traffic was already affected because of the penguin update this might be an opportune time to change the domain name, but since I am far from an expert at SEO I'm wondering if there are variables I am unaware of that might make this decision a very bad one.

Also we currently have exact match domains for our two different sites -- the way I understand it EMDs don't carry the same SEO weight they once did, but the firm is worried that losing the EMDs is going to cause a dramatic drop in traffic.  If we keep the EMDs but permanently redirect them to the new site, will it maintain their SEO value?  Would google consider that black hat and possibly penalize us for it in the future?

Thanks for any advice or insight!!

You have answered many questions I wasn't even sure I was asking!  Thank you for being clear and detailed, so many great people at Moz!

Follow up question, is there a way to have the subsite show up in the local result?  Or will I only be able to have a single url associated with the local result?  for example could www.wearelawyers.com/family show up in the local result for family law web searches and www.wearelawyers.com/defense show up for criminal defense searches?

So we currently have 2 separate websites for the 2 areas of law we practice, Criminal Defense and Family.  Currently our Criminal Defense website is the one affiliated with our google+ page and so it ranks well in local results, where as our Family website does not rank at all locally.

Would it be best for our Family practice if we merged it with our Criminal site?  We all work out of the same office and share address and phone number, so I don't believe we can associate the Family website with a google+ page, but I am wondering if each site would show up in Local results for their individual keywords if the criminal site and law site were both subdomains of a main Firm website.

I hope I can explain this clearly, hang in there!

One of the clients of the law firm I work for does some SEO work for the firm and one thing he has been doing is googling a certain keyword over and over again to trick google's auto fill into using that keyword. When he runs his program he generates around 500 hits to one of our attorney's bio pages.  This happens once or twice a week, and since I don't consider them real organic traffic it has been really messing up my GA reports.  Is there a way to block that landing page from my overall reports?  Or is there a better way to deal with the skewed data?

Any help or advice is appreciated, I am still so new to SEO I feel like a lot of my questions are obvious, but  please go easy on me!

To be honest we haven't yet gotten rigorous with our keyword planning - like I said I'm pretty new at SEO and everything has been a little overwhelming at first.  We are hoping our homepage will rank with "salt lake city criminal defense attorney" and then hope to optimize each of the individual 'charges' pages.  I haven't made it through every page on the site yet because there are so many, so thanks for bringing that particular one to my attention.

So I am wondering since "marijuana possession attorney" isn't a searched for term if it would be better to condense all the drug charge pages into one page instead of having them broken up into 11 more pages specific to each drug charge.

Thanks for your help and patience, definitely a huge learning curve here!

I work with a law firm and we are having a hard time busting into the first page of results for any of our keywords.  I am new at SEO and have been trying to analyze how are competitors have an edge over us when on paper we are better optimized than their websites.  One glaring difference is they have fewer webpages, which possibly makes each of their pages more keyword rich.

Would it be smarter to condense our many webpages/topics into less, more general web pages?

I hope my question is even making sense, thanks for any possible help!

Our site is http://www.utahdefenseattorney.net/

I had already claimed many of our listings before subscribing to Moz Local, will Moz Local just update those claimed listings or does it use the CSV file to create a duplicate  listings?  Out of nowhere I had about 5 duplicates pop up and am not sure where they came from.  They are a beast to get rid of so hoping there is an easy explanation/fix!

That does help David, thanks.  I guess I just need to curb my desire to micromanage.

Moz Local put up a basic listing for us on Best of the Web, but I'd like to claim the listing as well, so that I can edit it through my account.  Is this at all possible?

I had already claimed many of our listings before subscribing to Moz Local, will Moz Local just update those claimed listings or does it use the CSV file to create a duplicate  listings?  Out of nowhere I had about 5 duplicates pop up and am not sure where they came from.  They are a beast to get rid of so hoping there is an easy explanation/fix!

You have answered many questions I wasn't even sure I was asking!  Thank you for being clear and detailed, so many great people at Moz!

So we currently have 2 separate websites for the 2 areas of law we practice, Criminal Defense and Family.  Currently our Criminal Defense website is the one affiliated with our google+ page and so it ranks well in local results, where as our Family website does not rank at all locally.

Would it be best for our Family practice if we merged it with our Criminal site?  We all work out of the same office and share address and phone number, so I don't believe we can associate the Family website with a google+ page, but I am wondering if each site would show up in Local results for their individual keywords if the criminal site and law site were both subdomains of a main Firm website.