18 years later, Page Rank 6 Drops to 0, All +1s disappear, Scrapers outrank us

[seoagnostic]

18 years ago I put up our first website at http://oz.vc/6  Traffic grew and our forums reached hundreds of thousands of posts, our website had a page rank of 6 and our forums and other content areas ranked 5-6, the others usually 4-6. Panda 2.2 came along and whacked it. No measures recommended by SEO experts and the Matt Cutts videos even made a dent, including some pretty severe measures that were supposed to make a difference. Bing and Yahoo traffic both grew since Panda 2.2 and only Google kept dropping every few updates without recovery.

Several few weeks ago Google provides the ultimate whack. It seems every page other than the home page has either a PR of 0 or not generating any PR at all. Every +1 disappeared off of the site. Now three pages have +1 back and the entire guide section (hundreds of articles) are still missing all +1s.

I discovered two scrapers, one of which was copying all of our forum posts and ranking a PR 2 for it (while we have a zero. They were taken down but I still can't imagine how this result could happen. I am going to have an RSS feed aggregator taken down that is ranking a 2 and knows we can't prevent them from taking our Wordress feeds and storing them (we use them for areas on the site.) How can Google provide us with a zero page rank and give obvious scrapers page rank?

What should have been years worth of awesome rich added content and new features was wasted chasing Google ghosts. I've had two SEO people look at the site and none could point to any major issue that would explain what we've seen, especially the latest page rank death penalty. We haven't sold paid links. We have received no warnings from Google (nor should we have.) The large "thin" area you may see in a directory were removed entirely from Google (and made no difference and a drop in Google doing the "right" thing!) Most think we have been stuck for a very long time in the rare Google glitch. Would be interested in your insights.

[seoagnostic]

I can no longer reply to this 3+ year old thread since I am not a "pro" member but figured I'd update this topic with an edit, since it is available.

First -- It turned out that my analysis, observations and conclusions were correct. While there are a good amount of well intended and quality suggestions, none of the above made any difference and were not the crux of the matter. I cannot and won't disclose the issue here but it was remedied.

Second - It was disappointing that, in spite of the fact that I cloaked my domain for the obvious purpose, others did not follow. Instead they used the domain so that it can be indexed by search engines. I hope they can and choose to edit their posts and that a respectful practice here can be maintained. My original response remains below.

--------------------------------------------------------------

I do believe that any of these companies can fix your website site. I know that because I have worked with many of them and these are people who get results time and time again....I can tell you most likely they're going to charge you for such assessment it would be in the thousands most likely....Now normally and it's bad practice to guarantee anything in stringent opposition because Google can make a change overnight and nullify everything....I can tell you without a doubt that these guys can fix your site.

My website isn't broken.  I do think you're making some assumptions. If SEO was pure cause and effect and my PR is zero everywhere because of something I did wrong per se, then all these SEO companies will be glad when I pay them after my PR returns to a 6.  You are overlooking one big possibility - that some sites just may fall inside the "acceptable margin of error" and nothing you can do will make a dent despite every SEO swearing it will. It may also be a mistake which does happen among a multitude of variables. Hence you have to carefully screen whom you work with and come as prepared as possible so that every dollar goes right into providing the highest ROI. Site owners are responsible for doing their part too. What's disturbing is that this such an extreme PR death penalty that on another very well known site everyone was swearing I MUST be selling links and Google knew it somehow... as that is the penalty.

I'm not knocking your host just letting you know that anyone who specializes in WordPress and only WordPress knows a lot more about it than the guys who post everything... now hosted on Zippykid with dual CDN's F5 load balancers, private cloud architecture with a Cisco enterprise-level firewall along with the option for a free optimization every site is optimized by Net DNA or Google engineer designed around the Nginx Web server instead of Apache the amount of memory saved his incredible.

It's clear you know a lot about the subject - truly. Ideally, I agree. I'll give it some thought about moving my two dedicated servers but that is a lot of work and $$$. Right now Google has me needlessly chasing a ghost since nobody can point a finger at why I've received a drastic result usually only reserved for the most serious offenders. When we solve that, perhaps we might have money to tinker with perfection. (When I say I have some understanding, I was directly involved in creating and running a site that had to handle 10 billion annual page views. Your suggestions are excellent for fine tuning.)  FTUm Webpagetest just reported that an article loads a page in 2.5 seconds first view and a mere second and a half for repeat. That's quite good.

If somebody guarantees that they can fix something on your website in order to make it more search engine friendly that I could see a possible guarantee....I know that unless continuous work is done to keep Google happy essentially campaign then a ongoing relationship that keeps your website to where you are making a positive ROI otherwise it should really not worth it right?

Read what you're writing to me here. In your enthusiasm, you keep saying how these companies will fix my problem. From my perspective, that's why on earth Google still has my entire site stuck at a PR 0. What you're saying now is that for a hefty fee of several thousand dollars, someone will fix errors on my site which include many cosmetic ones that I really don't care so much about if they will make a marginal difference. The real problem I have in choosing people to work with is that in this industry (and I'm not saying you), there is a tendency not to take a look at the problem and provide a reasonable estimate. It's about finding one or two items that are technically wrong and then hypothesize to a client why they could need to bill hundreds of work hours just to fix them all because anything is possible, Google obsesses about this and that, etc.

I've been looking to invest in a long term relationship doing SEO and very importantly, SEM. But what I needed to know before I speak with anyone is whether (and why) nobody can even remotely identify the major area that resulted in the Google PR death penalty. If most said "I can see that the X area is the one where most of your problems are" then I'd be able to have much more confidence that hiring an SEO who agrees and works on remedying X will provide the best chances for the recovery. As of right now, all I'm hearing is that I need to spend thousands on an assessment and only then I might need to spend many more thousands on a crapshoot to see what works by tidying up everything. That's my hesitation. I'm writing to ask Matt Cutts if Google has a scholarship program, lol. I'll eventually choose one but the fact that there is no concensus at all on some good signs of how 17 years of work was reversed to PR 0 or less in one day is very disconcerting.

Want to Improve your Website but don’t know where to Start?
https://yoast.com/hire-us/website-review/
Regarding your robots.txt
I used a tool that pulls any robot text on the website sometimes it's a more than one place for instance somebody can putt two plug-ins that each control the same function robots.txt in this case... I also think the site map is set up incorrectly it should just be simply one index sitemap_index.XML I don't know that you even need one for your form however that's something I would needs more time on. However I would ideally put into the same index.

I appreciate all the info. You could be right and will need to rereview it all. FYI, all the robots.txt files are generated by (drum roll please) Joost's Wordpress SEO plugin by Yoast. It's an amazing tool. The reason for the multiple sitemaps is due to multiple blogs with each one generated by the tool. On the surface, I'm told that there is nothing wrong with that and Google specifically provides you with a tool to submit each sitemap you have.

Thanks for the explanation about the robots.txt issue. I don't disagree with you there and am familiar with it. One problem also is that Google doesn't document when it provides data that they know is wrong or, more accurately phrased, not properly identified. For example, much of what you see was an attempt to rid myself of numerous 404s I'd see in Webmaster tools. After wasting months of time someone informed me of a Google rep who explained that Google doesn't necessarily crawl the 404s it reports that it crawled on a recent date. Why this isn't in documentation is beyond me but at least I stopped trying to mess with the robots.txt to try to stop the spider from reporting it spidered successfully non-existent directories.

I will send you a private message and the choice is yours I would strongly suggest using one of the companies I suggested. you can also get Yoast to look over your site for $1100 and tell you what's wrong.

Joost is awesome. I should have had him do it long ago when he offered me the review at a discount before everything totally exploded for them, lol. I still may contact him and had considered doing. However, I didn't want to waste his valuable time and my money on a report that might only provide him with time to point out all the obvious things I should have seen by expending just a modicum of time. I wanted to get the site cleaned up so that when I hired someone, he/she could use that same block of time to provide a much higher level and useful review. And once I get that high level review, I can use the remaining money on recurring work so that my SEO/SEM is doing the more results oriented work they want to be doing and I, as a client, will feel like I'm really getting good value for the money. As I said, even clients have to get their act together if they want to be able to honestly appraise the value of what their SEO consultant is doing for them.

I will do this if you would like please feel free to call me tomorrow I have an appointment at 11 o'clock Eastern time I'm not looking to try to get business trust me however I feel that when people discuss things over the phone they tend to get worked out much faster than any other method.

It's always awkward in this position so don't sweat it.  You've given a lot of your time here. I know there is some altruistic motive. There is nothing wrong with hoping to land a client as well who will be appreciative of generosity and willingness to be the first to help reassure that you know you can do the job and prove a little faith on your own time. Thanks again, much appreciated and will also respond to you off-forum as well.

[seoagnostic]

Thomas - thank you for your very sincere words. They are much appreciated.

_I know Matt and could understand where he was coming from. __I am not in any way trying to be confrontational I simply believe _**from my many years of SEO that while somebody who has then a part of your niche in the past or still is may have more insight into your day-to-day business however when it comes to how websites deal with Google it has never mattered at all whether or not the person actually has worked in the industry In which the website focuses on. **I think you're right if one party says red any other said blue sometimes green wood be the answer however it is not the norm.

I truly appreciate what you're trying to say - truly. But again your still not seeing the subtle but very important point I've been making. From many years in business I've come to learn (not always the easy way) that it is 100% necessary to accept the fact that you will have blind spots and ask questions so  you can identify them and learn how to deal with them.

I'm glad that you and Matt were willing to take some time to do a quick "review at a glance" of my site. Inherent in a free review (thank you again) is that you can't afford to fully concentrate and digest more complex sites as you would in a paid consultation. It's totally understandable you might gloss over something and miss the significance. I reminded Matt that I've been around a long time so that if he saw something that looked preposterous, e.g. that I'd be stupid enough to plagiarize content word for word, he should question me first instead of implying that I'm just not versed well enough in SEO to appreciate the implications. Here's a hypo that is right on point. Being a cardiologist doesn't make me know much more than the basics about podiatry. What if there was a 30 page podiatry guide every specialist made available online? Then all of you are in the same boat, it's a zero effect on SEO versus your competitors and the content isn't plagiarized at all. Matt didn't answer what he was looking at but, if it was a word for word copy of something he found on a non-scraped site it's almost certainly in a separate subdomain that has some public domain resources. However, it all looks very much like the rest so I'd recognize it instantly but you guys wouldn't.

Believe me I did not mean to make that personal and I know that you want what is best for your site and you have every right to question people's opinions. I wholeheartedly apologize for my remarks if they offended you in any way.I'm happy to move on and continue helping you find a solution if you would like me to.

First - thank you very much for your very generous words. Do know that I never once took anything personally. I totally appreciate what you guys do and the time YOU spent on your post specifically. Totally forgotten here and I'll get to the good stuff in the next post. These forums are mostly filled with tense people with problems and unfortunately much of the time it's people that don't want to accept obvious problems, e.g. you're fortunate to rank well for SEO spun content in the poker niche.

[BlueprintMarketing]

Hi Mike,
I did not mean to be at all confrontational or disrespectful  or confrontational or mean that you are disrespectful. I know Matt and could understand where he was coming from.
I am not in any way trying to be confrontational I simply believe from my many years of SEO that while somebody who has then a part of your niche in the past or still is may have more insight into your day-to-day business however when it comes to how websites deal with Google it has never mattered at all whether or not the person actually has worked in the industry In which the website focuses on.
I think you're right if one party says red any other said blue sometimes green wood be the answer however it is not the norm.
Having said that I believe all good SEO's should have to explained their reasoning as to why they believe something that the client has a differing opinion on.

Believe me I did not mean to make that personal and I know that you want what is best for your site and you have every right to question people's opinions.

I wholeheartedly apologize for my remarks if they offended you in any way.
I'm happy to move on and continue helping you find a solution if you would like me to. The reason I said don't get mad at me was when people feel strongly about one thing or another and this is an important thing and it would be wrong of me to tell you something I didn't this right was correct but if we disagree there needs to be a common ground as you stated. I understand you much better now and I don't want to leave you hanging.

You asked me how I got your robots.txt
because what I posted is different from going to your site and looking at the standard robots.txt

I do believe that any of these companies can fix your website site. I know that because I have worked with many of them and these are people who get results time and time again.

I can tell you that I don't just recommend anyone and I cannot comment on what they would charge you don't know.

I can tell you most likely they're going to charge you for such assessment it would be in the thousands most likely

Then once they have come to their decision as to the best course of action you would receive the main quote.

Now normally and it's bad practice to guarantee anything in stringent opposition because Google can make a change overnight and nullify everything.

With that said and this is a precaution people take because I'm sure you understand is an attorney your time is worth something to you.

I am a chemical engineer by trade I still am in fact I have a company that manufactures release liner blown film extrusion in New Hampshire.

I do this because I honestly enjoy it gotten to enjoy it too much. 
You shared a bit about yourself I thought it would share a little about myself. Just to know each other.

I can tell you without a doubt that these guys can fix your site. If you want my own opinion of what I would do seeing as how I have looked at quite a bit of it I would save myself a lot of money and use a managed WordPress host they're going to be able to fix a lot of things that other people in charge a lot more for. I have seen people pay for things that companies like WP engine, Zippy kid, Web synthesis & Page.ly will do for free table make sure that your site is up and running with the robot text for instance I know that the guys that the hosts I've named will handle that for you free of charge. If you're hosted with them.

I can't even tell you that WP engine and Zippykid each have had the company automatic the one that owns WordPress invest in them. Those two both share technology as well so you get a lot. In my opinion web synthesis this is is an excellent host as well and pagely would be a big improvement over what you're on right now http://steadfast.net/

I'm not knocking your host just letting you know that anyone who specializes in WordPress and only WordPress knows a lot more about it than the guys who post everything.

I don't mean to get too off topic but you favor and look at each of the companies I have listed one thing that you might find bothersome for not is most of them do not have phone support only one zippy kid offers 24 7 phone support WP engine only when you spend $250 plus on their larger plan however both are excellent web hosts. In fact they're all excellent at customer support answering tickets. If you want to host that will literally take care of a lot of the WordPress issues you have might want to consider one of the above hosts and I say this because I have an account with each and every one of them.

Here is a site that is built out of hundred percent HTML 5 based on Genesis 2.0 WordPress it is optimized extremely well so well in fact that in Europe it still maintains site load speeds of under one second this particular site is now hosted on Zippykid with dual CDN's F5 load balancers, private cloud architecture with a Cisco enterprise-level firewall along with the option for a free optimization every site is optimized by Net DNA or Google engineer designed around the Nginx Web server instead of Apache the amount of memory saved his incredible.
for illustrative purposes, serving 10,000 simultaneous connections would only cause Nginx to use 2 megabytes of RAM whereas Apache would probably consume hundreds of megabytes (if it could do it at all).
the result it's fast take look at a site that just was brought over.
http://www.gregreindel.com/
with HTML 5 and all that brings to the table it is extremely search engine friendly and if you have any of these issues in the future the host will fix it

Getting back to what you are looking for. I would definitely recommend any of the companies below and if you're asking me are they going to pay you back the fee if they cannot remedy your problem. It would all depend on would deal you made mostly what you consider your problems to be. They're not going to guarantee anything with Google knowing well that is not going to lie to you. Honestly if somebody does guarantee you rankings run there impossible to guarantee. If somebody guarantees that they can fix something on your website in order to make it more search engine friendly that I could see a possible guarantee.
However don't think you get any of them to look at site for free and to be completely up front with you a lot of them or probably not available they're very good at what they do.

I think if you want Matt to do the job then I would discuss that with him he's a great guy and I think the one thing. When run into with all SEO's is not we can't figure this out it's going to be we will figure this out and give you a price. in this case because you are not saying well I need you to work on a campaign to any of them I can't tell you that it would be a free examination of your site. I really doubt it would be.

I know that unless continuous work is done to keep Google happy essentially campaign then a ongoing relationship that keeps your website to where you are making a positive ROI otherwise it should really not worth it right?

"You state great certainty that any of them would fix the problem. Would that mean that these SEO consultants would be paid part after completion of the fix and the problem solved? If so, it's a no brainer and I'd hire them immediately since the return on investment pays for continued investment. But I will tell you that from my experience most spoke with same certainty of fixing the problem as you do along with great projections but they didn't reflect that same degree of certainty when it came time to talk about billing."

It is completely possible to set a goal and offer 50% up front and 50% when the goals met I don't see the harm in asking I would be very specific about what you consider fixed is

http://evolvingseo.com
http://distilled.net
http://www.portent.com/
http://Internetmarketingninjas.com
http://www.seerinteractive.com/

Now one thing you mentioned was you like Yoast I do too.

Why don't you use is service it seems like this might be the perfect answer for what you need right now.

Want to Improve your Website but don’t know where to Start?

https://yoast.com/hire-us/website-review/
Regarding your robots.txt
I used a tool that pulls any robot text on the website sometimes it's a more than one place for instance somebody can putt two plug-ins that each control the same function robots.txt in this case

And the tool formats it correctly it allows you to make adjustments if needed.
Essentially I've used it pull from your domain not just robots.txt

Here is the link I suggest you check it out and put your domain or if you like as the instructions say you can just put in http://www.thelaw.com/robots.txt

http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/seo-tools/robots-txt-generator/

I would change to this

1
User-Agent: *
2
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/

http://yoast.com/example-robots-txt-wordpress/

Robots.txt is a way to tell a search engine which pages it’s allowed to spider, to “see”, and which pages it cannot “see”. Because of that, robots.txt differs from meta name="robots" tags, which tell search engines on those individual pages, whether they can include them in their index or not. The difference is subtle, but important. Because of that, the suggested robots.txt in the codex is wrong. Let me explain:
Google sometimes lists URLs that it’s not allowed to spider, because it’s blocked by robots.txt, because a lot of links point to a URL. A good example of this is a search for [RTL Nieuws] (disclosure: RTL is a client of mine). rtlnieuws.nl 301 redirects to the news section of rtl.nl. But… rtlnieuws.nl/robots.txt exists… And has the following content:
1
User-agent: *
2
Disallow: /
Because of that, the links towards rtlnieuws.nl don’t count toward the news section on rtl.nl, and Google displays rtlnieuws.nl in the search results. This is unwanted behavior that we’re trying to fix but for now it’s a good example of what I wanted to explain. By blocking /wp-admin/ and /trackback/ in your robots.txt, you’re not preventing them from showing up.
Unfortunately, recently the /wp-admin/ block was added to WordPress core, because of this Trac ticket. In the discussion on that ticket, I’ve proposed another solution in this patch. This solution involves sending an X-Robots-Tag header, which is the HTTP header equivalent of a meta name="robots" tag. This would in fact remove all wp-admin directories from Google search results.
WordPress Robots.txt blocking Search results and Feeds
There are two other sections which are blocked in the suggested robots.txt, /*?, which blocks everything with a question mark and as such all search results, and */feed/, which blocks all feeds. The first is not a good idea because if someone were to link to your search results, you wouldn’t benefit from those links.
A better solution would be to add a tag to those search results pages, as it would prevent the search results from rankings but would allow the link “juice” to flow through to the returned posts and pages. This is what my WordPress SEO plugin does as soon as you enable it. It also does this for wp-admin and login and registration pages.
I’m aware that that is different from Google’s guidelines on this topic at the moment, which state:
Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines.
I’ve reached out to Google to get clarification on whether they would say my solution is acceptable as well, or perhaps even better .
Blocking /feed/ is a bad idea because an RSS feed is actually a valid site map for Google. Blocking it would prevent Google from using that to find new content on your site. So, my suggested robots.txt for WordPress is actually a lot smaller than the Codex one. I only have this:
1
User-Agent: *
2
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/
I block the plugins directory because some plugin developers have the annoying habit of adding index.php files to their plugin directories that link back to their websites. For all other parts of WordPress, there are better solutions for blocking.
The other WordPress Robots.txt suggestions
The other sections of the robots.txt as suggested are a bit old and no longer needed. Digg mirror is something for us old guys who remember when Digg used to send loads of traffic, Googlebot Image and Media Partner are still there but if you only have the above in your robots.txt you don’t need specific lines for them in your WordPress robots.txt file.

I also think the site map is set up incorrectly it should just be simply one index sitemap_index.XML I don't know that you even need one for your form however that's something I would needs more time on. However I would ideally put into the same index.

http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/forum/vbulletin-4/vbulletin-4-questions-problems-and-troubleshooting/426502-is-an-xml-sitemap-that-crucial-for-forums

I will do this if you would like please feel free to call me tomorrow I have an appointment at 11 o'clock Eastern time I'm not looking to try to get business trust me however I feel that when people discuss things over the phone they tend to get worked out much faster than any other method. If I can be of help to you in any way I would be happy to do that. I will also be happy to explain to any reasons I feel you should go one way if you feel that is not the right way.

I will send you a private message and the choice is yours I would strongly suggest using one of the companies I suggested. you can also get Yoast to look over your site for $1100 and tell you what's wrong.

All the best,

Thomas

[seoagnostic]

_ I have to agree with Matt on this one for a few reasons. His niche is search engine optimization I respect that you've been running your own site for 15 years and I think what's being missed here  is Matt is giving you a a lot of his time and resources to look into. I would be spending my time looking at the robots.txt it's a nightmare Yoast suggests using this for WordPress _

Thomas - thank you for taking some of your valuable time to post as Matt did twice. I don't understand why you're under the impression that I'm not appreciative, which I will say yet again, of course I am thanking you guys. It's not your jobs to help me out. This is not being missed.

I will confess being a little frustrated. To repeat what I have tried to express - If we are looking at a problem and you say that you see green but I say blue, we need to figure out the reason for that discrepancy before we can talk about a solution, right? All I've done (stating my experience) is kindly request that you guys assume that I have a good amount of knowledge in this area, despite the fact that I fully understand and appreciate that this is your core competence. That's not lost on me.

So I am in total agreement with you that the robots.txt file would be a total "nightmare" - if it was the same as what you've posted, which it is not. I cannot account for whether it's being seen wrong or your extraction method isn't pulling the file correctly. Here it is:

vBulletin forum sitemap

Sitemap: http://www.thelaw.com/forums/xmlsitemap.php

WP

Sitemap: http://www.thelaw.com/sitemap_index.xml
Sitemap: http://www.thelaw.com/guide/sitemap_index.xml
Sitemap: http://www.thelaw.com/articles/sitemap_index.xml
Sitemap: http://www.thelaw.com/journal/sitemap_index.xml
Sitemap: http://www.thelaw.com/review/sitemap_index.xml
Sitemap: http://www.thelaw.com/daily/sitemap_index.xml
Sitemap: http://www.thelaw.com/log/sitemap_index.xml
Sitemap: http://www.thelaw.com/app/sitemap_index.xml
Sitemap: http://www.thelaw.com/jobs/sitemap_index.xml

Support desk to be added

User-agent: *
Disallow: /abovethelaw/
Disallow: /adsother/
Disallow: /advice/
Disallow: /animation/
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /cse/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /code/
Disallow: /codeny/
Disallow: /codesnips/
Disallow: /dev/
Disallow: /dictionary/
Disallow: /error/
Disallow: /form/
Disallow: /forum/
Disallow: /forums/ajax.php
Disallow: /forums/attachment.php
Disallow: /forums/calendar.php
Disallow: /forums/converse.php
Disallow: /forums/cron.php
Disallow: /forums/editpost.php
Disallow: /forums/global.php
Disallow: /forums/image.php
Disallow: /forums/inlinemod.php
Disallow: /forums/joinrequests.php
Disallow: /forums/login.php
Disallow: /forums/memberlist.php
Disallow: /forums/members.php
Disallow: /forums/member.php
Disallow: /forums/misc.php
Disallow: /forums/moderator.php
Disallow: /forums/newattachment.php
Disallow: /forums/newreply.php
Disallow: /forums/newthread.php
Disallow: /forums/forums/
Disallow: /forums/images/
Disallow: /forums/jobs/
Disallow: /forums/legal-help/
Disallow: /forums/online.php
Disallow: /forums/poll.php
Disallow: /forums/postings.php
Disallow: /forums/printthread.php
Disallow: /forums/private.php
Disallow: /forums/register.php
Disallow: /forums/report.php
Disallow: /forums/reputation.php
Disallow: /forums/search.php
Disallow: /forums/sendmessage.php
Disallow: /forums/showgroups.php
Disallow: /forums/subscription.php
Disallow: /forums/threadrate.php
Disallow: /forums/usercp.php
Disallow: /forums/usernote.php
Disallow: /forums/z/
Disallow: /generator/
Disallow: /geoip/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /job/
Disallow: /lawyers/
Disallow: /LAWYERS_CURRENT/
Disallow: /legalforms/
Disallow: /menu/
Disallow: /news/
Disallow: /nlmailer/
Disallow: /siteforms/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /feed
Disallow: /*/feed
Disallow: /xmlrpc
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /?p=
Disallow: /*trackback
Allow: /wp-content/uploads/

User-agent: rogerbot
Disallow: /

User-agent: exabot
Disallow: /

User-agent: MJ12bot
Disallow: /

User-agent: dotbot
Disallow: /

User-agent: gigabot
Disallow: /

User-agent: AhrefsBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Yandex
Disallow: /

User-agent: Baiduspider
Disallow: /

User-agent: JikeSpider
Disallow: /

User-agent: YoudaoBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: BoardReader
Disallow: /

-------------------------------------------------------

Yoasts gets 1 million visitors a month and he only needs this

I love Yoast and Joost is a very nice guy and quite witty! But I'm assuming you realize that there are many difference between my site and Yoast, not the least of which is a very large forum and other scripts. I much appreciate your explanation of the Wordpress portion of the robots.txt in the Codex. So while I understand that what you've proposed is an improvement, what is it that you're trying to say here? No disrespect, just not sure what you're suggesting.

_ every one of them would be able to solve your problem. It's most likely that you're blocking the search engines in some form or combination of many things but it's not an impossibility to fix. If you believe spending a few thousand dollars on something that you've worked 15 years for is to much I don't know what to tell you._

You state great certainty that any of them would fix the problem. Would that mean that these SEO consultants would be paid part after completion of the fix and the problem solved? If so, it's a no brainer and I'd hire them immediately since the return on investment pays for continued investment. But I will tell you that from my experience most spoke with same certainty of fixing the problem as you do along with great projections but they didn't reflect that same degree of certainty when it came time to talk about billing.

I certainly do need the SEO/SEM help and have been looking for it. If Matt was available, he'd probably be ideal since he's already familiar with what I do and the niche. Finding someone who is honest and has experience in creating long term relationships that work isn't easy in this business. What I am trying to do is to get my ducks in a row so that the work that needs to be done isn't elementary but that which is about moving the dial. I'm willing to put out the money with the right group. The choices are more difficult than you realize. Anyways, thanks for sharing your opinion and knowledge.

[BlueprintMarketing]

I have to agree with Matt on this one for a few reasons. His niche is search engine optimization I respect that you've been running your own site for 15 years and I think what's being missed here  is Matt is giving you a a lot of his time and resources to look into. I would be spending my time looking at the robots.txt it's a nightmare Yoast suggests using this for WordPress

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/

 your robot text currently looks like this

User-agent: *
Allow: /wp-content/uploads/
Disallow: /abovethelaw/
Disallow: /adsother/
Disallow: /advice/
Disallow: /animation/
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /cse/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /code/
Disallow: /codeny/
Disallow: /codesnips/
Disallow: /dev/
Disallow: /dictionary/
Disallow: /error/
Disallow: /form/
Disallow: /forum/
Disallow: /forums/ajax.php
Disallow: /forums/attachment.php
Disallow: /forums/calendar.php
Disallow: /forums/converse.php
Disallow: /forums/cron.php
Disallow: /forums/editpost.php
Disallow: /forums/global.php
Disallow: /forums/image.php
Disallow: /forums/inlinemod.php
Disallow: /forums/joinrequests.php
Disallow: /forums/login.php
Disallow: /forums/memberlist.php
Disallow: /forums/members.php
Disallow: /forums/member.php
Disallow: /forums/misc.php
Disallow: /forums/moderator.php
Disallow: /forums/newattachment.php
Disallow: /forums/newreply.php
Disallow: /forums/newthread.php
Disallow: /forums/forums/
Disallow: /forums/images/
Disallow: /forums/jobs/
Disallow: /forums/legal-help/
Disallow: /forums/online.php
Disallow: /forums/poll.php
Disallow: /forums/postings.php
Disallow: /forums/printthread.php
Disallow: /forums/private.php
Disallow: /forums/register.php
Disallow: /forums/report.php
Disallow: /forums/reputation.php
Disallow: /forums/search.php
Disallow: /forums/sendmessage.php
Disallow: /forums/showgroups.php
Disallow: /forums/subscription.php
Disallow: /forums/threadrate.php
Disallow: /forums/usercp.php
Disallow: /forums/usernote.php
Disallow: /forums/z/
Disallow: /generator/
Disallow: /geoip/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /job/
Disallow: /lawyers/
Disallow: /LAWYERS_CURRENT/
Disallow: /legalforms/
Disallow: /menu/
Disallow: /news/
Disallow: /nlmailer/
Disallow: /siteforms/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /feed
Disallow: /*/feed
Disallow: /xmlrpc
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /?p=
Disallow: /*trackback

User-agent: rogerbot
Disallow: /
Allow: /wp-content/uploads/
Disallow: /abovethelaw/
Disallow: /adsother/
Disallow: /advice/
Disallow: /animation/
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /cse/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /code/
Disallow: /codeny/
Disallow: /codesnips/
Disallow: /dev/
Disallow: /dictionary/
Disallow: /error/
Disallow: /form/
Disallow: /forum/
Disallow: /forums/ajax.php
Disallow: /forums/attachment.php
Disallow: /forums/calendar.php
Disallow: /forums/converse.php
Disallow: /forums/cron.php
Disallow: /forums/editpost.php
Disallow: /forums/global.php
Disallow: /forums/image.php
Disallow: /forums/inlinemod.php
Disallow: /forums/joinrequests.php
Disallow: /forums/login.php
Disallow: /forums/memberlist.php
Disallow: /forums/members.php
Disallow: /forums/member.php
Disallow: /forums/misc.php
Disallow: /forums/moderator.php
Disallow: /forums/newattachment.php
Disallow: /forums/newreply.php
Disallow: /forums/newthread.php
Disallow: /forums/forums/
Disallow: /forums/images/
Disallow: /forums/jobs/
Disallow: /forums/legal-help/
Disallow: /forums/online.php
Disallow: /forums/poll.php
Disallow: /forums/postings.php
Disallow: /forums/printthread.php
Disallow: /forums/private.php
Disallow: /forums/register.php
Disallow: /forums/report.php
Disallow: /forums/reputation.php
Disallow: /forums/search.php
Disallow: /forums/sendmessage.php
Disallow: /forums/showgroups.php
Disallow: /forums/subscription.php
Disallow: /forums/threadrate.php
Disallow: /forums/usercp.php
Disallow: /forums/usernote.php
Disallow: /forums/z/
Disallow: /generator/
Disallow: /geoip/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /job/
Disallow: /lawyers/
Disallow: /LAWYERS_CURRENT/
Disallow: /legalforms/
Disallow: /menu/
Disallow: /news/
Disallow: /nlmailer/
Disallow: /siteforms/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /feed
Disallow: /*/feed
Disallow: /xmlrpc
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /?p=
Disallow: /*trackback

User-agent: exabot
Disallow: /
Allow: /wp-content/uploads/
Disallow: /abovethelaw/
Disallow: /adsother/
Disallow: /advice/
Disallow: /animation/
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /cse/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /code/
Disallow: /codeny/
Disallow: /codesnips/
Disallow: /dev/
Disallow: /dictionary/
Disallow: /error/
Disallow: /form/
Disallow: /forum/
Disallow: /forums/ajax.php
Disallow: /forums/attachment.php
Disallow: /forums/calendar.php
Disallow: /forums/converse.php
Disallow: /forums/cron.php
Disallow: /forums/editpost.php
Disallow: /forums/global.php
Disallow: /forums/image.php
Disallow: /forums/inlinemod.php
Disallow: /forums/joinrequests.php
Disallow: /forums/login.php
Disallow: /forums/memberlist.php
Disallow: /forums/members.php
Disallow: /forums/member.php
Disallow: /forums/misc.php
Disallow: /forums/moderator.php
Disallow: /forums/newattachment.php
Disallow: /forums/newreply.php
Disallow: /forums/newthread.php
Disallow: /forums/forums/
Disallow: /forums/images/
Disallow: /forums/jobs/
Disallow: /forums/legal-help/
Disallow: /forums/online.php
Disallow: /forums/poll.php
Disallow: /forums/postings.php
Disallow: /forums/printthread.php
Disallow: /forums/private.php
Disallow: /forums/register.php
Disallow: /forums/report.php
Disallow: /forums/reputation.php
Disallow: /forums/search.php
Disallow: /forums/sendmessage.php
Disallow: /forums/showgroups.php
Disallow: /forums/subscription.php
Disallow: /forums/threadrate.php
Disallow: /forums/usercp.php
Disallow: /forums/usernote.php
Disallow: /forums/z/
Disallow: /generator/
Disallow: /geoip/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /job/
Disallow: /lawyers/
Disallow: /LAWYERS_CURRENT/
Disallow: /legalforms/
Disallow: /menu/
Disallow: /news/
Disallow: /nlmailer/
Disallow: /siteforms/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /feed
Disallow: /*/feed
Disallow: /xmlrpc
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /?p=
Disallow: /*trackback

User-agent: MJ12bot
Disallow: /
Allow: /wp-content/uploads/
Disallow: /abovethelaw/
Disallow: /adsother/
Disallow: /advice/
Disallow: /animation/
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /cse/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /code/
Disallow: /codeny/
Disallow: /codesnips/
Disallow: /dev/
Disallow: /dictionary/
Disallow: /error/
Disallow: /form/
Disallow: /forum/
Disallow: /forums/ajax.php
Disallow: /forums/attachment.php
Disallow: /forums/calendar.php
Disallow: /forums/converse.php
Disallow: /forums/cron.php
Disallow: /forums/editpost.php
Disallow: /forums/global.php
Disallow: /forums/image.php
Disallow: /forums/inlinemod.php
Disallow: /forums/joinrequests.php
Disallow: /forums/login.php
Disallow: /forums/memberlist.php
Disallow: /forums/members.php
Disallow: /forums/member.php
Disallow: /forums/misc.php
Disallow: /forums/moderator.php
Disallow: /forums/newattachment.php
Disallow: /forums/newreply.php
Disallow: /forums/newthread.php
Disallow: /forums/forums/
Disallow: /forums/images/
Disallow: /forums/jobs/
Disallow: /forums/legal-help/
Disallow: /forums/online.php
Disallow: /forums/poll.php
Disallow: /forums/postings.php
Disallow: /forums/printthread.php
Disallow: /forums/private.php
Disallow: /forums/register.php
Disallow: /forums/report.php
Disallow: /forums/reputation.php
Disallow: /forums/search.php
Disallow: /forums/sendmessage.php
Disallow: /forums/showgroups.php
Disallow: /forums/subscription.php
Disallow: /forums/threadrate.php
Disallow: /forums/usercp.php
Disallow: /forums/usernote.php
Disallow: /forums/z/
Disallow: /generator/
Disallow: /geoip/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /job/
Disallow: /lawyers/
Disallow: /LAWYERS_CURRENT/
Disallow: /legalforms/
Disallow: /menu/
Disallow: /news/
Disallow: /nlmailer/
Disallow: /siteforms/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /feed
Disallow: /*/feed
Disallow: /xmlrpc
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /?p=
Disallow: /*trackback

User-agent: dotbot
Disallow: /
Allow: /wp-content/uploads/
Disallow: /abovethelaw/
Disallow: /adsother/
Disallow: /advice/
Disallow: /animation/
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /cse/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /code/
Disallow: /codeny/
Disallow: /codesnips/
Disallow: /dev/
Disallow: /dictionary/
Disallow: /error/
Disallow: /form/
Disallow: /forum/
Disallow: /forums/ajax.php
Disallow: /forums/attachment.php
Disallow: /forums/calendar.php
Disallow: /forums/converse.php
Disallow: /forums/cron.php
Disallow: /forums/editpost.php
Disallow: /forums/global.php
Disallow: /forums/image.php
Disallow: /forums/inlinemod.php
Disallow: /forums/joinrequests.php
Disallow: /forums/login.php
Disallow: /forums/memberlist.php
Disallow: /forums/members.php
Disallow: /forums/member.php
Disallow: /forums/misc.php
Disallow: /forums/moderator.php
Disallow: /forums/newattachment.php
Disallow: /forums/newreply.php
Disallow: /forums/newthread.php
Disallow: /forums/forums/
Disallow: /forums/images/
Disallow: /forums/jobs/
Disallow: /forums/legal-help/
Disallow: /forums/online.php
Disallow: /forums/poll.php
Disallow: /forums/postings.php
Disallow: /forums/printthread.php
Disallow: /forums/private.php
Disallow: /forums/register.php
Disallow: /forums/report.php
Disallow: /forums/reputation.php
Disallow: /forums/search.php
Disallow: /forums/sendmessage.php
Disallow: /forums/showgroups.php
Disallow: /forums/subscription.php
Disallow: /forums/threadrate.php
Disallow: /forums/usercp.php
Disallow: /forums/usernote.php
Disallow: /forums/z/
Disallow: /generator/
Disallow: /geoip/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /job/
Disallow: /lawyers/
Disallow: /LAWYERS_CURRENT/
Disallow: /legalforms/
Disallow: /menu/
Disallow: /news/
Disallow: /nlmailer/
Disallow: /siteforms/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /feed
Disallow: /*/feed
Disallow: /xmlrpc
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /?p=
Disallow: /*trackback

User-agent: gigabot
Disallow: /
Allow: /wp-content/uploads/
Disallow: /abovethelaw/
Disallow: /adsother/
Disallow: /advice/
Disallow: /animation/
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /cse/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /code/
Disallow: /codeny/
Disallow: /codesnips/
Disallow: /dev/
Disallow: /dictionary/
Disallow: /error/
Disallow: /form/
Disallow: /forum/
Disallow: /forums/ajax.php
Disallow: /forums/attachment.php
Disallow: /forums/calendar.php
Disallow: /forums/converse.php
Disallow: /forums/cron.php
Disallow: /forums/editpost.php
Disallow: /forums/global.php
Disallow: /forums/image.php
Disallow: /forums/inlinemod.php
Disallow: /forums/joinrequests.php
Disallow: /forums/login.php
Disallow: /forums/memberlist.php
Disallow: /forums/members.php
Disallow: /forums/member.php
Disallow: /forums/misc.php
Disallow: /forums/moderator.php
Disallow: /forums/newattachment.php
Disallow: /forums/newreply.php
Disallow: /forums/newthread.php
Disallow: /forums/forums/
Disallow: /forums/images/
Disallow: /forums/jobs/
Disallow: /forums/legal-help/
Disallow: /forums/online.php
Disallow: /forums/poll.php
Disallow: /forums/postings.php
Disallow: /forums/printthread.php
Disallow: /forums/private.php
Disallow: /forums/register.php
Disallow: /forums/report.php
Disallow: /forums/reputation.php
Disallow: /forums/search.php
Disallow: /forums/sendmessage.php
Disallow: /forums/showgroups.php
Disallow: /forums/subscription.php
Disallow: /forums/threadrate.php
Disallow: /forums/usercp.php
Disallow: /forums/usernote.php
Disallow: /forums/z/
Disallow: /generator/
Disallow: /geoip/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /job/
Disallow: /lawyers/
Disallow: /LAWYERS_CURRENT/
Disallow: /legalforms/
Disallow: /menu/
Disallow: /news/
Disallow: /nlmailer/
Disallow: /siteforms/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /feed
Disallow: /*/feed
Disallow: /xmlrpc
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /?p=
Disallow: /*trackback

User-agent: AhrefsBot
Disallow: /
Allow: /wp-content/uploads/
Disallow: /abovethelaw/
Disallow: /adsother/
Disallow: /advice/
Disallow: /animation/
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /cse/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /code/
Disallow: /codeny/
Disallow: /codesnips/
Disallow: /dev/
Disallow: /dictionary/
Disallow: /error/
Disallow: /form/
Disallow: /forum/
Disallow: /forums/ajax.php
Disallow: /forums/attachment.php
Disallow: /forums/calendar.php
Disallow: /forums/converse.php
Disallow: /forums/cron.php
Disallow: /forums/editpost.php
Disallow: /forums/global.php
Disallow: /forums/image.php
Disallow: /forums/inlinemod.php
Disallow: /forums/joinrequests.php
Disallow: /forums/login.php
Disallow: /forums/memberlist.php
Disallow: /forums/members.php
Disallow: /forums/member.php
Disallow: /forums/misc.php
Disallow: /forums/moderator.php
Disallow: /forums/newattachment.php
Disallow: /forums/newreply.php
Disallow: /forums/newthread.php
Disallow: /forums/forums/
Disallow: /forums/images/
Disallow: /forums/jobs/
Disallow: /forums/legal-help/
Disallow: /forums/online.php
Disallow: /forums/poll.php
Disallow: /forums/postings.php
Disallow: /forums/printthread.php
Disallow: /forums/private.php
Disallow: /forums/register.php
Disallow: /forums/report.php
Disallow: /forums/reputation.php
Disallow: /forums/search.php
Disallow: /forums/sendmessage.php
Disallow: /forums/showgroups.php
Disallow: /forums/subscription.php
Disallow: /forums/threadrate.php
Disallow: /forums/usercp.php
Disallow: /forums/usernote.php
Disallow: /forums/z/
Disallow: /generator/
Disallow: /geoip/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /job/
Disallow: /lawyers/
Disallow: /LAWYERS_CURRENT/
Disallow: /legalforms/
Disallow: /menu/
Disallow: /news/
Disallow: /nlmailer/
Disallow: /siteforms/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /feed
Disallow: /*/feed
Disallow: /xmlrpc
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /?p=
Disallow: /*trackback

User-agent: Yandex
Disallow: /
Allow: /wp-content/uploads/
Disallow: /abovethelaw/
Disallow: /adsother/
Disallow: /advice/
Disallow: /animation/
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /cse/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /code/
Disallow: /codeny/
Disallow: /codesnips/
Disallow: /dev/
Disallow: /dictionary/
Disallow: /error/
Disallow: /form/
Disallow: /forum/
Disallow: /forums/ajax.php
Disallow: /forums/attachment.php
Disallow: /forums/calendar.php
Disallow: /forums/converse.php
Disallow: /forums/cron.php
Disallow: /forums/editpost.php
Disallow: /forums/global.php
Disallow: /forums/image.php
Disallow: /forums/inlinemod.php
Disallow: /forums/joinrequests.php
Disallow: /forums/login.php
Disallow: /forums/memberlist.php
Disallow: /forums/members.php
Disallow: /forums/member.php
Disallow: /forums/misc.php
Disallow: /forums/moderator.php
Disallow: /forums/newattachment.php
Disallow: /forums/newreply.php
Disallow: /forums/newthread.php
Disallow: /forums/forums/
Disallow: /forums/images/
Disallow: /forums/jobs/
Disallow: /forums/legal-help/
Disallow: /forums/online.php
Disallow: /forums/poll.php
Disallow: /forums/postings.php
Disallow: /forums/printthread.php
Disallow: /forums/private.php
Disallow: /forums/register.php
Disallow: /forums/report.php
Disallow: /forums/reputation.php
Disallow: /forums/search.php
Disallow: /forums/sendmessage.php
Disallow: /forums/showgroups.php
Disallow: /forums/subscription.php
Disallow: /forums/threadrate.php
Disallow: /forums/usercp.php
Disallow: /forums/usernote.php
Disallow: /forums/z/
Disallow: /generator/
Disallow: /geoip/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /job/
Disallow: /lawyers/
Disallow: /LAWYERS_CURRENT/
Disallow: /legalforms/
Disallow: /menu/
Disallow: /news/
Disallow: /nlmailer/
Disallow: /siteforms/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /feed
Disallow: /*/feed
Disallow: /xmlrpc
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /?p=
Disallow: /*trackback

User-agent: Baiduspider
Disallow: /
Allow: /wp-content/uploads/
Disallow: /abovethelaw/
Disallow: /adsother/
Disallow: /advice/
Disallow: /animation/
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /cse/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /code/
Disallow: /codeny/
Disallow: /codesnips/
Disallow: /dev/
Disallow: /dictionary/
Disallow: /error/
Disallow: /form/
Disallow: /forum/
Disallow: /forums/ajax.php
Disallow: /forums/attachment.php
Disallow: /forums/calendar.php
Disallow: /forums/converse.php
Disallow: /forums/cron.php
Disallow: /forums/editpost.php
Disallow: /forums/global.php
Disallow: /forums/image.php
Disallow: /forums/inlinemod.php
Disallow: /forums/joinrequests.php
Disallow: /forums/login.php
Disallow: /forums/memberlist.php
Disallow: /forums/members.php
Disallow: /forums/member.php
Disallow: /forums/misc.php
Disallow: /forums/moderator.php
Disallow: /forums/newattachment.php
Disallow: /forums/newreply.php
Disallow: /forums/newthread.php
Disallow: /forums/forums/
Disallow: /forums/images/
Disallow: /forums/jobs/
Disallow: /forums/legal-help/
Disallow: /forums/online.php
Disallow: /forums/poll.php
Disallow: /forums/postings.php
Disallow: /forums/printthread.php
Disallow: /forums/private.php
Disallow: /forums/register.php
Disallow: /forums/report.php
Disallow: /forums/reputation.php
Disallow: /forums/search.php
Disallow: /forums/sendmessage.php
Disallow: /forums/showgroups.php
Disallow: /forums/subscription.php
Disallow: /forums/threadrate.php
Disallow: /forums/usercp.php
Disallow: /forums/usernote.php
Disallow: /forums/z/
Disallow: /generator/
Disallow: /geoip/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /job/
Disallow: /lawyers/
Disallow: /LAWYERS_CURRENT/
Disallow: /legalforms/
Disallow: /menu/
Disallow: /news/
Disallow: /nlmailer/
Disallow: /siteforms/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /feed
Disallow: /*/feed
Disallow: /xmlrpc
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /?p=
Disallow: /*trackback

User-agent: JikeSpider
Disallow: /
Allow: /wp-content/uploads/
Disallow: /abovethelaw/
Disallow: /adsother/
Disallow: /advice/
Disallow: /animation/
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /cse/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /code/
Disallow: /codeny/
Disallow: /codesnips/
Disallow: /dev/
Disallow: /dictionary/
Disallow: /error/
Disallow: /form/
Disallow: /forum/
Disallow: /forums/ajax.php
Disallow: /forums/attachment.php
Disallow: /forums/calendar.php
Disallow: /forums/converse.php
Disallow: /forums/cron.php
Disallow: /forums/editpost.php
Disallow: /forums/global.php
Disallow: /forums/image.php
Disallow: /forums/inlinemod.php
Disallow: /forums/joinrequests.php
Disallow: /forums/login.php
Disallow: /forums/memberlist.php
Disallow: /forums/members.php
Disallow: /forums/member.php
Disallow: /forums/misc.php
Disallow: /forums/moderator.php
Disallow: /forums/newattachment.php
Disallow: /forums/newreply.php
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User-agent: YoudaoBot
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User-agent: BoardReader
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Sitemap: http://www.thelaw.com/jobs/sitemap_index.xml

he currently is working with HTML 5 and Genesis 2 so he keeps saying do not use what's on my website it could cause problems however the snippet above is something he does recommend this this is current sites robots.txt

Yoasts gets 1 million visitors a month and he only needs this

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/
Disallow: /out/
Disallow: /bugs/
Disallow: /suggest/
Allow: /wp-content/plugins/vipers-video-quicktags/resources/jw-flv-player/player.swf

 but recommends this for everyone

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/

if you want to look into more changes with your robots.txt I suggest using
http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/seo-tools/robots-txt-generator/
it is a fine tool that allows you to see the changes real-time in comparison if you were to alter your robots.txt

http://yoast.com/articles/robots-meta-tags/

http://yoast.com/example-robots-txt-wordpress/

Robots.txt is a way to tell a search engine which pages it’s allowed to spider, to “see”, and which pages it cannot “see”. Because of that, robots.txt differs from `meta name="robots"` tags, which tell search engines on those individual pages, whether they can include them in their index or not. The difference is subtle, but important. Because of that, the [suggested robots.txt in the codex](http://codex.wordpress.org/Search_Engine_Optimization_for_WordPress#Robots.txt_Optimization) is wrong. Let me explain:

Google sometimes lists URLs that it’s not allowed to spider, because it’s blocked by robots.txt, because a lot of links point to a URL. A good example of this is a search for [[RTL Nieuws](https://www.google.com/search?q=rtl+nieuws&pws=0)] (disclosure: RTL is a client of mine). rtlnieuws.nl 301 redirects to the [news section of rtl.nl](http://www.rtl.nl/actueel/rtlnieuws/home/). But… rtlnieuws.nl/robots.txt exists… And has the following content:

| `1` | `User-agent: *` |

| `2` | `Disallow: /` |

Because of that, the links towards rtlnieuws.nl don’t count toward the news section on rtl.nl, and Google displays rtlnieuws.nl in the search results. This is unwanted behavior that we’re trying to fix but for now it’s a good example of what I wanted to explain. By _blocking_ /wp-admin/ and /trackback/ in your robots.txt, you’re not preventing them from showing up.

Unfortunately, recently the /wp-admin/ block was added to WordPress core, because of[this Trac ticket](http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/18465). In the discussion on that ticket, I’ve proposed another solution in [this patch](http://core.trac.wordpress.org/attachment/ticket/18465/noindex.patch). This solution involves sending an X-Robots-Tag header, which is the HTTP header equivalent of a `meta name="robots"` tag. This _would_ in fact remove all wp-admin directories from Google search results.

 I believe both of you guys have a lot of passion for what you do and it shows. What needs to happen or what should happen is either somebody has to start looking into things because honestly too many other sites are doing just fine it is not google singling you out however I do feel that Google has rough policies but regardless of that.

 Please do not respond with anything that Will be at all confrontational as I am taking the time to try to help I'm doing this as a volunteer you know not really anything more.

 I am hoping that you guys can get this fixed obviously there is something wrong with your website I would pay a well recognized search engine optimization company to fix it if I were you however that doesn't seem to be what you want to do.

 I'm certain if you took it to the 

  http://evolvingseo.com

http://distilled.net

http://www.portent.com/

 http://Internetmarketingninjas.com

or

http://www.seerinteractive.com/

 every one of them would be able to solve your problem. It's most likely that you're blocking the search engines in some form or combination of many things but it's not an impossibility to fix. If you believe spending a few thousand dollars on something that you've worked 15 years for is to much I don't know what to tell you.

 I would take into account that search engine optimization and whatever the subject is don't always have to coincide you might be surprised to find out that the best marketers are not part of the same field their promoting meaning they have no history of working in it, but they know it gets things done on their end.

 I would honestly take it to a reputable SEO as there are issues with the site.

 Sincerely,

 Thomas

[seoagnostic]

_Fact: I graduated law school in 2002. I can read your articles just fine... 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. _

As I asked, what sentences are you referring to? What pages? While I appreciate you went to law school, ran a similar site, etc. it has no bearing on the fact that I _know _that I wrote my own articles. When you tell me that my articles are copies of Black's and all spun - that is incredibly insulting and embarrassing... and it's a wrongful assumption. It's possible you might not realize that you are referring to the dictionary subdomain rather than the guide subdirectory. If so, then we can get both of ourselves on the same page and discuss how this may or may not be a problem at all.

I sorted your OpenSiteExplorer link export by Anchor text, removed 10 or so links of the top 50 and this is what we find...

OK. This is more useful. Thanks, I appreciate it. There's no way this alone should destroy the entire site's PR but it's not so trivial. It ticks me off that someone would do this and it will have to be disavowed and I'll do what I can to have some of these things taken down. We already caught about half of the list you've got up and disavowed them and sent takedowns. I'll have them look again in another tool and don't think (hope) that there are too many more. Disappointing.

_Fact: Your site has duplication issues.  This is a fact. Somewhere in this mess is your "atomic bomb."  _

It would appear you didn't click through any of the links. If you did you'd realize that it's an RSS feed for one article and the title and sentence will appear on a few other pages on the site. For example, the home page of the journal has the title "Gangnam" and the excerpt. You also got the article page itself. You also got the home page which has the titles of the latest articles in each section. This isn't an atomic bomb because at one time we might be talking about 20 articles in total whose titles and 2 sentence excerpts appear as a teaser on the site. You may not have realized this.

_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. _

They aren't the same link.

1 is the actual article URL.
2 is the category page for our journal which has the "recent posts" that contains the title and excerpt.
4 is the excerpt in the RSS feed page.
8 is a whole other article that contains the title with "Gangnam Style" in it as a related post link that is probably in the sidebar at the moment.

Regarding the robots.txt message, read it again more closely. I'm not sure it says what you may have thought on first impression.

Fact__: Your "Contact" and "Help" pages are identical.
Fact: SEO is made of up hundreds of small ranking factors.
This is what I mean by needing to chill and realize that if someone seems pretty knowledgeable, chances are what seems like a large difference of opinion on a simple issue is probably a result of misunderstanding of something. The URLs are different but unfortunately the actual contact page was redirecting to the same page as a result of a recent change. Yes, I'm perfectly aware that SEO is made up of many factors but this is, once again, something you'd want to correct but - IMHO - there aren't a multitude of these trivial items (by themselves) which wouldn't take down the site to zero.

Fact: Your suggestion that some glitch has "dropped an atomic bomb" on your site is incorrect....You rank #3 on page 1 for this term.  That's not exactly getting slammed by Google.

That is not what I said. Now I appreciate the entire lecture and how you went to law school, etc. But the fact is that I said that the page rank dropped like an atomic bomb. I never said anything about one search term.

Let's talk about one obvious place among many I disappeared from - the search for "Law Forum". The title used to be "The Law Forum" and I wasn't even listed at all for many, many months. A handful of good competitors also dropped like a rock and total junk walked in. If you do a search now I'm off the first page. One of the entries on page is a horrendous sites with duplicate content up the wazoo, missing navigation, a blatant link exchange and has been gaming the system. It's the worst site my guys had seen last year and couldn't explain why it keeps ranking. We can talk about that separately but it's a good reason why I'm ticked off having watched Google let this guy game the system in the most blatant way. And for years, lawfo rum.net was the #1 or 2 result and that was nothing but an adsense page for each "forum" with no forums. Now it's an SEO company.

_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.  _

I agree 100%. What do you mean "hurt"? I don't want to jump to any conclusions about what you're trying to say. Without being sarcastic, since you went to law school and do SEO, perhaps taking another look might lead you to realize why those items are on subdomains rather than subdirectories. It's for all the reasons why Rand mentions. Perhaps we can discuss further when you take another look.

_**Quick facts: **_Pagerank is not a valid metric for measuring your site in 2013.

Once again we have a communication problem. I never said it was a site metric. What I said is that the Pagerank dropped through the floor and it concerns me greatly. Whether or not what you said is true is irrelevant because for the purposes of marketing, many people DO feel it has value. And it does have value. And apparently Matt Cutts takes it seriously too.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/why-did-my-pagerank-go-down/

Many were suggesting that our Pagerank dropped - even further than this site - because of selling links. Everyone has parroted that Google must be thinking this but can't point to anything because we don't sell links. So the only question here is why has Pagerank gone from 6 to zero and, in some cases, unranked altogether and NOT on spam articles. It's the whole site.

+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.

Of course I searched before I posted. And if you read through the webmaster forums you'd see that others reported Google problems where all their +1s disappeared and later returned after something was fixed. A Google employee responded to a couple of these to say they were technical errors on Google's end. The fact is that, once again, you aren't reading what I wrote carefully. ALL of my +1s disappeared from the entire guide section. We are talking hundreds of pages where every single plus one disappeared - and it has been weeks.

---

Anyways... thank you for taking some valuable time to try to help out here. As you can see, I think there is far more of a misunderstanding than you realized. If you'd like to continue the conversation, I'm hoping we could dial it back a bit. Sometimes what you see at a glance might have been different than your original impression. I spent several months in Melbourne a long time ago. I remember thinking for a moment that I must have walked into the red light district because I saw all those four X signs, wondering what is more hardcore than triple X, lol. Thanks and regards to you around the globe.

[seoagnostic]

Matt -  

Take a deep breath. Relax. If you read my reply to you again you'd realize that I was in no way being disrespectful to you. I thanked you for spending some valuable time doing something you had no obligation to perform. Two things before I reply:

I have worked on my site and in this niche for over 15 years. It is certainly possible that I might be far more familiar with its workings than yourself, as well as how things work within my niche. That's not a slap to your professionalism or condescedning. It's just saying that the short time you spent taking a look - which I appreciate - might not have been sufficient time to see what I'm seeing. Take a look again and we can talk about it.

Second - I'm sorry you took my friendly ribbing the wrong way which was actually a response to your surprise that I had two SEO experts look at this and found nothing. That's not at all what I said. Look again. I said that they didn't find anything that would explain the earth shattering. It's a subtle but very important difference and changes the answer dramatically. I could have really taken that as condescending but laughed and chalked it up to forum-type discussions that sometimes get lost between people.

I have a lot to offer and plenty to learn. I've been doing this a very long time too. So... with no disrespect, no need to hold your breath and reply.... I'll respond.  Please understand that I'm not going to try to tear you apart but agree with you on some things and politely and firmly disagree with some things you believe to be "facts". Thanks and I look forward to a helpful, productive discussion with another professional in the industry.

[MattAntonino]

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.proxybugs.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:

• Pagerank is not a valid metric for measuring your site in 2013.

• +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.

• 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

[seoagnostic]

Matt -

Thanks for taking the time to take a look, it's much appreciated. Yes, I had two SEOs look at this who know my niche and said they cannot find anything glaring at all on a large site like ours that would explain the atomic bomb being dropped. You provide some useful stuff (and thanks!) but haven't really either found too much to complain about. The +1 votes missing just seems to further suggest we've been caught in some glitch. I'll reply to your points.

1. Title Tag - Very minor issue appearing that only affects a few pages if you look closely. Fixed and thanks.

2. The internally linked jpeg - There is practically no way Google thinks I'm suddenly in the link selling business because one single link was named "banner" with an internal link to my own stuff. If that's the cause to blow up the entire site, I should have received a warning for a link selling penalty and it's goodbye to the 99% of the Internet that is way more obvious!

3. There is no duplicate content issue on the site - In addition, numerous sources have long reported that there is no duplicate content penalty (I think Matt Cutts himself may have stated this.) The article you refer to appears once. Scrapers shouldn't reduce your forums from 5-6 to a zero. In addition, if Google can figure out artificial link building, it surely must know a scraper if it sees another site suddenly grow quickly with content that it indexed from another site for the past 13 years. I point at a likely error affecting my site because we have a zero PR and Google gave the scraper a PR 2 - who is now down due to my takedown notice. Google's failure to figure out something a 5 year old could (the Wordpress scraper's site was bare bones, obvious scraper site) then I'd hope to have a dialogue with someone to understand why.

4. My home page experience is quite clean. Perfect? Nothing is perfect. The link you pointed out was a recent change, no biggie. The copyright statement is in no way telling Google anything related to PR or of much value for that matter. I've updated it to use the right footer. Note that the scraper had no copyright year - yet ranked above our site - so there goes that theory. The oldest game is for scrapers to predate their Wordpress posts, forum posts, etc. ) Google should know this. And the two links in the footer are for UI. Too many users are lazy so as not to submit a ticket to the right department. Similar area but not the same link, not a UI issue. 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.

5. Old links pre-2010. Well... the first web page I put up was back in 1995. I don't think Google expects every website owner to require a full SEO staff to try to remove links from pages that are dated directories and the like which weren't created by us and just a sign of the times. Some of the "spam" you refer to are just very dated pages when compiling lists was popular. My backlinks may contain RSS aggregation sites, true. But as Google points out, you had better be darn sure to disavow well or it will work against you. Funny thing is that most SEOs today always assumed sites had "link building campaigns" when it was really just organic. I'll look again and only for the comment spam, which should absolutely not appear and there might be some negative SEO efforts here.

6. One comment spam link - not generated by us. Will get it disavowed an try to scour the rest of the backlinks. There just isn't enough of this to justify a PR 6 to 0 for hundreds of thousands of pages, even with someone's negative SEO campaign.

7. There are no spun articles - you'll need to point to something specific. I know because I wrote most of them. 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. What you're not realizing is that my articles are generally more than 500 words and far more comprehensive than the other "article sites." I don't blame you for thinking this at first glance as I'm familiar with my own niche. Could some be in the realm of more general? Sure - the couple in the articles section which is user submitted (just a dozen or so.) But we are far, far away from an article directory and this requires closer observation. If you're talking about the anchor text to our lead gen page, that's our niche and it explains what it is. If you have a suggestion, glad to hear it. Otherwise, this too isn't taking down the whole site or 90+% of the Internet would unquestionably go to zero PR.

FYI - the largest area of the site - by far - is the law forum, well cared for with much useful information. Why is that now all a page rank zero? There is no explanation for an indefinite death penalty. Now if you want to know why my "competitors" are catching up it's because since Panda 2.2 Google has me chasing nothing and I've wasted years of effort on nonsense like this instead of producing awesome content. _I'll show you three sites in my niche that have blatant link exchanges, spammy titles in their forums, RSS feeds in their forums to increase Google's indexing, a horrendous UI and duplicate content from other sites -- and those sites have been making serious gains on my traffic. _The fact is, as I stated above, is that Bing, Yahoo and the others have allowed my content to consistently grow without egregious, death penalty measures with absolutely no way to easily determine why and nobody at Google to begin to explain the above. They are simply not reachable. Unless someone can point out something that might explain the atom bomb being dropped, I'm going to have to resort to doing the only thing that worked post-Panda 2.2 and see if that changes something. If it does again, it will be a rather remarkable indication and potential confirmation of what some theorists believe.

[seoagnostic]

Thanks for your response. The truth is that if a few bad links sets you back to the dark era, it's not worth the effort of putting out content whatsoever. I'm under the impression, as are most, that you'd have to do something pretty severe to blow up a legitimate website up for 18 years with hundreds of thousands of legitimate posts.

I've looked through the small stuff. If there are a couple of bad links, we'll get rid of them and use the disavow tool since there is little we can do to control what happens outside of our site. But the issue is that Google never warned us that there is any problem. Don't know why they would. But the real indicator that something must be wrong is that a scraper was rating a PR 2 for our own posts and we went to zero for an extended period of time now. The missing +1 votes even further suggests some problem.

[MoosaHemani]

Ouch! I really can feel the pain and i also agree that just some or few shitty links in your profile can kill all your efforts and kick you back to the dark era.

Let me sort that first... disappearing +1 has nothing to do with updates or any similar thing this must be a fault from the programming end.

Now let’s move to PR from 6 to 0... Even after the penguin 2.0 (a.k.a  #4) I can show you some garbage results against some of the most powerful and money making keywords so saying that Google cannot made mistakes will be wrong...

I believe what you really should do is to clean the links that are absolutely garbage or low quality links! Also try to use software like “link risk” to find questionable links in your profile and then remove or disavow them...

After this send reconsideration request to Google and explain your problem in details and there is a good chance they might look in to your website and life the penalty again!

This is what i think should work!

[MattAntonino]

1. First, your title is messed up. I'd just fix that.

<title></span><span class="webkit-html-tag" data-mce-mark="1">TheLaw.comFree legal help and information since 1995 | TheLaw.com</span><span class="webkit-html-tag" data-mce-mark="1"></title>

2. You have (what looks like) an ad in your sidebar that I believe is dofollow.  Google may not "know" that the ad-looking thing is really a link to your own site, especially since you named it banner.jpg, a very common ad term.  If they think you have paid ads dofollow on your site, that could be an issue.

3. You haven't taken care of duplicate content issues on your own site, let alone with scrapers. (Google: site:www.thelaw.com gangnam)

4. Your user experience is far from perfect. (Click on "Workers Compensation, Benefits" on your homepage - broken link.  There are more.)  Two of your footer links go to basically the same place.  And your copyright statement says 2010.  Google is obsessed with user experience, so they say. Telling them your site hasn't been updated since 2010 would be a negative factor, even if it doesn't "directly affect rankings."

5. A lot of your backlink profile contains stuff you wouldn't really want in there.  You block a lot of robots so it's hard to get a truly accurate view of your backlinks but almost all of it contains heavy anchor text - many of your links were built before 2010.  Your link profile is really heavily skewed toward old school link building (directories, anchor text, sites that have nothing but links, what looks like a ton of article spam)

6. Forgetting the link profile I mentioned above, blog comment spam abounds: http://foundationrentalgroup.com/Blog/Darcy/post/NEW-LISTING!-Home-for-Rent-in-Tiburon.aspx  Anchor text, obviously spun spam text: See the google search.

7. Spun articles - most articles that have anchor text back to your site are repeated on other article sites. Very common 5-10 years ago. Gets you in a heap of crap now.

There's more but you said you had two SEOs look at this?  And they really found nothing?

It looks to me like your competitors are growing and your site (including broken pages, repeated info, deprecated code) hasn't stayed very current.  That would be my assessment at first glance.

~Matt

[seoagnostic]

Thomas -

Thanks for your comment. Much of the general information you're sharing I've been through for quite a while, although I know it is well intended. Scrapers will target my site periodically and no matter what program I'd use, takedown notices are just a matter of what we need to do periodically.

I just replied to someone else about the links you're pointing to above as "junk" and spam. Sites like mine have been around since the 1990s and what you call "spammy looking junk" looks more "dated" to us. We've seen this back when the web was young. Take a look at every link you've listed above - none of them are obvious garbage. In fact, they look more like lists someone compiled on their site long ago and they typically neglect them or don't bother to update their look for the new millennium. FYI, I use a backlink checker that uses technology from another service similar to MOZ.

• http://www2.pair.com/budg/ - I notice several high ranking websites around for a long time (like lectric law.)
• http://www.srikumar.com/freebies/freebies.htm - Has all my major competitors, include some of the largest you've missed.

The pages you've pointed to aren't a horde of blog spam, which is true spam. And even assuming some backlinks might be bad, you don't exactly go from a PR 6 to a zero, lose all your +1s for that.

I know my competitors very well. Lawyers.com is billion dollar company. You've missed a few others who can afford to pay the SEO firms you've listed $150 an hour or what they are asking to patiently inspect links and eventually remove some, add others and, in many cases, plant articles on very high PR sites in order to build traffic. Some of the links back are in directories. It was common for people to try to populate them with popular sites to grow them. Why do I have to audit these directories and disavow websites that aren't great but not necessarily spam? (e.g. linksnow). I don't think these are devastating our site. We didn't lose some PR - we lost ALL value. That's an insane result. If a few bad links knocked me to zero, 90% of the Internet should be well into the negative PR numbers and that isn't happening - as scrapers are actually ranking for my own content. That is easy to spot but for some reason, Google is still rewarding this.

Anyway, thanks for taking the time to try to help. With a death penalty like this, there has to be evidence of a lot larger a crime and it should be conspicuous. I'll review the links but it's not likely the cause is here.

[BlueprintMarketing]

hi this is something that I believe is the result of your link profile not content.

I used a few tools to check out your site and unfortunately you have a lot of junk pointing to it

http://marketing.grader.com/site/www.thelaw.com

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/thelaw.com#

I would also use tools similar to scribe content when building your content

http://scribecontent.com/

look for information from hub spot and scribe that way you can't generate what I'm seeing is a very large amount of free directories that aren't worth anything and Google is penalizing you mostly because you are getting by before with your exact match domain now that they have most likely taken that away from you in fact I'm sure they have you are now stuck with very few links pointing to your website of any value. I would contact a very good firm like

distilled.net

http://www.portent.com/

Internet marketing ninjas

You have some links that are not at all related to your site pointing at you.

however even worse you have a tremendous amount of spam links pointing to your website here is a handful Google essentially is telling people now if you do this your and a lot of trouble.

You have quite a few of these pointed out your site, and I would do everything in my power to remove them.

you can compare yourself to your competitors here I have given links sites that are similar to yours

while one of them has a very good hosting company as the actual domain this is got to be the strangest link I've ever seen please put your mouse over the lines below this is all in clear text if you highlight it with your mouse you will see what I'm talking about

the link itself is here

http://www2.pair.com/budg/  I know this must of been a strange test because that company pair networks is a fantastic web host

Cyberlinked Bookmarks !! ..... Happy Surfing on the Web!! 
Over 1,700 sites, thanks for all the global email and support of friends ..... latest entries are at the bottom of this list!!
from Cyberlinker (Bud)   click here for bottom

http://irkawebdirectory.com/society-culture/law/

http://business-research.info/business-research-links.htm

http://www.srikumar.com/freebies/freebies.htm

Linksnow Directory- International > Reference >

http://linksnow.se/international/reference/ask-an-expert/

As you're probably aware your content can be stolen on a and Google will rank it page that has more authority it's extremely unfortunate and based on the fact that your site is about the law I would definitely go after the people or what  I have found much easier is go after the web host allowing the content on their site you can use copy scape to find the people copying your website then simply write a letter Google web host responsibility the Digital millennium act

you will find that every web host would rather lose a customer then be find the $150,000 you are entitled to if they keep the content up. I had this issue I went directly to the host towing bother with the person you can actually give them a form signed with the digital signature and they must take it down or you can take them to court I found they made the offending websites go away within 2 days of me delivering them a affidavit did he mail and the Digital millennium act.

freeadvice.com

• 2justanswer.com

• 3expertlaw.com

• 4law.cornell.edu

• 5legalengine.com

• 6worldlawdirect.com

• 7uslaw.com

• 8nolo.com

• 9megalaw.com

• 10lawyers.com

inspect your competitors websites see what's happening to them. Write in your blog continuously create new content that way

you may also want to look at coppyblogers authority program it is definitely what I would say can help you in this situation.

I hope this helps,

Thomas