From your perspective, what's wrong with this site such that it has a Panda Penalty?

[sprynewmedia]

www.duhaime.org

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)

[Malarowski]

What are you trying to rank for?

[sprynewmedia]

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

[AdoptionHelp]

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!

[AdoptionHelp]

Speaking of duplicate content...

[sprynewmedia]

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.

[sprynewmedia]

1. 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.

2. Above.

3. 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.

[AdoptionHelp]

Its cool, your previous questions didn't really get answered... and my answer was posted twice so above is the edited one. Whoops!