When Panda's attack...

[sprynewmedia]

I have a predicament.  The site I manage (www.duhaime.org) has been hit by the Panda update but the system seems fixed against this site’s purpose.   I need some advice on what i'm planning and what could be done.

First, the issues:

Content Length

The site is legal reference including dictionary and citation look up.  Hundreds (perhaps upwards of 1000) of pages, by virtue of the content, are thin.  The acronym C.B.N.S. stands for “Common Bench Reports, New Series” a part of the English reports.  There really isn’t too much more to say nor is there much value to the target audience in saying it.

Visit Length as a Metric

There is chatter claiming Google watches how long a person uses a page to gauge it’s value.  Fair enough but, a large number of people that visit this site are looking for one small piece of data.  They want the definition of a term or citation then they return to whatever caused the query in the first place.

My strategy so far…

Noindex some Pages

Identify terms and citations that are really small – less than 500 characters – and put a no index tag on them.  I will also remove the directory links to the pages and clean the sitemaps.  This should remove the obviously troublesome pages.  We’ll have to live with the fact these page won’t be found in Google’s index despite their value.

Create more click incentives

We already started with related terms and now we are looking at diagrams and images.  Anything to punch up the content for that ever important second click.

Expand Content (of course)

The author will focus the next six months on doing his best to extend the content of these short pages.  There are images and text to be added in many cases – perhaps 200 pages.  Still won't be able to cover them all without heavy cut-n-paste feel.

Site Redesign

Looking to lighten up the code and boiler plate content shortly.  We were working on this anyway.  Resulting pages should have less than 15 hard-coded site-wide links and the disclaimer will be loaded with AJAX upon scroll.  Ads units will be kept at 3 per page.

What do you think?  Are the super light pages of the citations and dictionary why site traffic is down 35% this week?

[AdamThompson]

"Google watches how long a person uses a page to gauge it’s value"
Perhaps, but I wouldn't stress about that metric in particular. As you correctly pointed out, a visitor who is looking for a specific item and finds it will leave a site rather quickly.

Is the content unique or duplicate?

EDIT: According to a quick check on Copyscape, your content is duplicated across other sites. You definitely need unique content as a starting point.

[sprynewmedia]

All content is unique.  Much of it is 10 years old.

It gets duplicated/syndicated to other sites: some legit, others we constantly fight to have removed.  One in India completely copied the site from a few years ago and changed most of the links to internal addresses.

However, the owner wrote all of the non-quote or referenced material.

[sprynewmedia]

Traffic (and income) is now down over 55% which is really too bad.  The content is unique and highly valuable to the target market.

Any advice about why would be really appreciated.