Google is notorious in some circles for kicking sites out of the index or penalizing their rank for buying links. For those who don’t know, the number one factor influencing where you end up in a Google search for “widget” is how many people link to your website. Their algorithm assumes that your site gets incoming links because your site has worthwhile content. Buying links breaks the algorithm. You’re allowed to pay web sites to link to you, but you’re supposed to have the linking site use what’s called a nofollow tag, which tells Google not to count that link. If you search for “paid links” and “google penalty” you’ll find a ton of information about people who have been bitten by Google for breaking their rules. To many SEO experts, Google is an all-knowing tyrant, watching and waiting to catch someone who breaks the rules. When it comes to personal injury lawyers, Google is more like a drunk uncle passed out in the easy chair.
Many lawyers – especially personal injury lawyers – are buying links like crazy. I’m not going to name any names because I’m a nice guy. But there’s one very well-known lawyer who has bought thousands of incoming links from a variety of web sites that have nothing to do with the law… like a penis pump review web site. Others participate in paid blog rolls which to me seem like a gigantic violation of Google’s rules. Here’s how that works: A handful of web providers specialize in blog/web platforms for lawyers. When you join their service, you’re added to the blogroll that is on every other participant’s web site. So an attorney who has never written a blog post will have thousands of incoming links the second he decides to blog… provided he can afford the monthly fee for the service. Maybe I’m not understanding it properly, but that looks a hell of a lot to me like buying links. One such service even cloaks some of the links in the blog roll, so Google will see them, but visitors won’t. This is a blatant violation of Google’s rules… but Google doesn’t seem to give a shit.
Instead, Google rewards the lawyers who do it by giving them first and second page listings for very competitive terms. (And in some cases, pageranks of 5 or 6, which is very good.) Now, I know that some of the lawyers don’t know their SEO guys are buying links for them, or that they’re doing other naughty stuff. (Eric Turkewitz would probably say, “too bad.”) One lawyer has a very highly ranked web site that also happens to have thousands of web pages within it. At the bottom of each page is a small graphic that looks like a copyright logo. It isn’t – it’s a link to another client of his web designer. That client has nothing to do with the law, so there’s no reason for that client to be linked to on thousands of personal injury lawyer web pages. But it is, and I’m betting it is because the web designer is taking advantage of the ignorance of that attorney. (Not many attorneys know how to check to see what they’re linking to. Fewer know how to make sure their SEO guy isn’t buying links.)
It’s very frustrating to me because Google’s rules keep everyone on an even playing field. In six months or so, I’ll be graduating law school and will be looking for clients. How in the hell am I (or countless low-budget solos) supposed to be able to succeed if the top spots in Google are owned by unethical (or ignorant) attorneys who have SEO “experts” spend thousands of dollars every month on buying links? The sad fact is that few people outside of the law will add a lawyer’s website to their blog roll. Don’t believe me? Use Yahoo Site Explorer to check out some popular attorney blogs. You’ll find that 95 out of 100 incoming links to their sites come from others in the law.
What’s worse is that much of the content on the link buyers’ websites is just shit. A popular practice is to hire people to rewrite news stories. Here’s how that works: Some newspaper publishes a story about your practice area, like a car wreck, or a defective drug, etc. You hire a guy to rewrite that story just enough so the newspaper can’t sue for copyright infringement. (Newspapers can’t own the facts that make up the news.) That sort of thing is of little value to consumers. Nor are the endless “YOUR CITY HERE Car Accident Lawyer” tweets put out by clueless PI lawyers who think Twitter = unlimited clients. Good personal injury lawyer content is few and far between.
And don’t even get me started about the asbestos lawyers. One of the major sites is doing exactly what the Craigslist sex spammers do. They have a database of city names across the country. Then they have a database of appropriate phrases. Then, they play Mad Libs and make web pages. Here’s how that one works:
Assume their database has 50,000 city names in it. The database produces 50,000 web pages, each named after the city. (e.g. Las-Vegas-Nevada-Asbestos-Lawyer.html; Las-Vegas-New-Mexico-Asbestos-Lawyer.html.) Then each page is dynamically constructed from the database. Let’s say there are five sentences on the page. The first sentence introduces the firm, the second sentence says they handle asbestos, the third sentence has contact information, etc. The database will have five sentence tables, with each table containing say two or three dozen variations of each sentence. Some clever programming then pulls a random sentence from each of the sentence tables, and voila! (Not, “walla”) with a couple hours of work they now have 50,000 “unique” web pages, each targeted for someone who searches for “my city asbestos lawyer” on Google. They do the same thing with asbestos manufacturer names and professions exposed to asbestos. So you' get a ton of pages targeted towards “Johns Manville Asbestos Lawyer” or “Pipefitter Mesothelioma Lawyer.”
Yes, that technique is clever. But it’s spammy as hell. And I wonder why Google hasn’t done anything about it. The cynical side of me says that they’re not punishing those lawyers because (a) those lawyers also buy a lot of Google pay-per-click advertising, and (b) asbestos pay-per-click advertising is incredibly expensive. Seriously, a pay per click ad for “mesothelioma lawyer” can go for $100 bucks! (Yes, every time you click on one of those ads, a lawyer out there has to pay Google a Benjamin.) Maybe those lawyers are paying Google so much money in PPC ads that Google just doesn’t care if they’re breaking the rules. Or maybe there aren’t enough “dirty” lawyers in comparison with every other profession trying to game Google that Google figures it should target its resources elsewhere. If that’s the case, perhaps Google should take some law students as summer interns and train them how to look for the bad eggs. God knows that law students today would gladly do that kind of work for a summer if it gave them even a small chance of getting hired at the Big G. (Or anywhere, I suppose.)
One thing I find very interesting: The penis-pump lawyer ranks in the top five for a specific keyword search on Google, but closer to #50 on Bing. Has Bing come up with an algorithm that better handles paid links? I have noticed that some of the spammier PI sites don’t do as well in Bing as they do in Google. It will be interesting to track that long term.
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