Cardinale & DelVecchio Law Firm
Taking a two-office Central New York law firm off Duda and rebuilding it as 61 hand-built pages where every statute, fine, point value and deadline names its source and the date it was checked — and where not a single attorney credential was invented to fill a gap.
The site is finished and has not launched. So this is a build case study, not a results case study. There are no rankings, no traffic and no lead numbers on this page, because there is no live site to have produced them.
What is here is measured: page counts, word counts, schema coverage, contrast ratios, duplicate-content scores and link-graph depth — all read off the built site rather than estimated.
Thirteen pages, and none of them where the searches are.
Six practice areas and two counties were being served by thirteen content pages on a rented platform. The structural problem was the one that decides everything else: there was not one page that was both a service and a city — so there was nothing that could rank for how people actually search, and no amount of on-page work fixes a page that doesn't exist. Underneath that, legal figures appeared with no source and no date, the attorney bios carried no credentials at all, there was no court information anywhere, and the platform owned the site.
Sixty-one pages, and a rule about sourcing.
- An architecture that matches the searchesPractice hubs for someone who knows what they need, sub-issue pages for someone with a specific problem, and ten service-by-city pages across two counties for how people actually type it. Plus a court reference section no competing firm had written at all.
- Every legal figure cites its statute and its dateStatutes cited by section rather than paraphrased, and the reader is told to check the date. Two 2026 law changes were caught that most competing sites still describe wrongly — and a stale government page nearly propagated a wrong figure before it was checked against the primary source.
- 302 questions answered in the 40–60 word bandAcross 46 FAQPage nodes, 40 LegalService nodes and 60 BreadcrumbList nodes — the structure that gets a firm extracted and cited rather than skipped.
- Accessibility as a build requirement, not an overlayBody text at 15.6:1 contrast where AA needs 4.5, zero images missing alt text, 28 KB of total CSS with self-hosted fonts and no external requests, and no render-blocking scripts.
- Three custom audit tools written to check the work
houselint,csslintandinventory— every page tested against every other for near-duplication, producing zero broken internal links and zero orphaned public pages across all 61.
What we refused to publish.
For a law firm this matters more than anything above it. Attorney advertising is regulated, and the shortcuts that lift a page in the short term are the ones that draw a grievance.
- No invented attorney credentialsBar admission years, law schools and courts had not been supplied, and the build is configured to fail until they are. The alternative is a site that quietly ships without them.
- No bylines on pages nobody has readAn attorney byline is an E-E-A-T signal and an accountability claim. It goes on when the attorney has actually reviewed the page.
- No Review or AggregateRating schemaClient reviews are reproduced verbatim on the page — typos included — but not marked up as rating schema on the firm's own site.
- No “best,” no “expert,” no “specialist,” no promised outcomesAll four are restricted or prohibited in New York attorney advertising unless certified, and none of them is worth the exposure.
- No Cicero service pages, against the obvious temptationBuilding service × city pages for an office that supports them is architecture. Building them for one that doesn't is a doorway, and the 2026 spam updates target exactly that.
- No accessibility overlay, and no claim of full WCAG conformanceThe work was done in the markup. Claiming conformance we hadn't formally audited would be its own kind of false statement.
Built, measured, and awaiting launch.
The measurement chapter has not been written, and saying so is the point. At launch a Search Console baseline is captured — indexed pages, impressions by query, and Local Pack position for the service × city terms — and tracked against it from there. I'll add real figures here when there's enough data to stand behind, and not before. Attorney advertising. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.