Legal Marketing & PR

Google Slaps FindLaw In Effort to Crack Down On 'Link Juice'

By Larry Bodine, Esq.

The Web's No. 1 search engine has charged FindLaw with the shady tactic of selling Web links -- a.k.a. selling "link juice," designed to boost a Web site's search engine rankings -- such as the law firms that are FindLaw customers.  See the article on CNN Money.

Shortly after Cutts received FindLaw's sales email, Google briefly lowered FindLaw's so-called toolbar PageRank in its search engine from 7 to 5, a move that Steve Mathews, founder of the search engine optimization firm Stem Legal, describes as the difference between two notches on the Richter scale.  "That basically pulls the rug out from under FindLaw in terms of the value they can deliver to clients by selling links," said Matthews.

Law firms pay FindLaw $1,600 to $2,000 per month for FindLaw's "SEM Advantage" program, billed as a "high-octane" way to double or even triple traffic on their websites. One of the ways Google determines where a law firm website will rank for a specific search is the number and quality of inbound links to a website. The theory is that very interesting pages will be linked to by many other websites and blogs. A page or website with a lot of links therefore has a lot of authority (Google measures authority on a 1-10 logarithmic scale called PageRank).

FindLaw caught the attention of Matt Cutts, the head of Google's Webspam team, when he was recently forwarded an email sent out by the company's sales team to prospective clients. The sales pitch offered "up to three hard coded links" for $1,000 per month as part of its new SEM program designed to " leverage FindLaw's authoritative position as the top online destination" for lawyers.

When a highly ranked site like FindLaw links to another site without receiving any payment in return, search engines view that as a vote in favor of the link's destination site, and that boosts its ranking in a search. When a link on a popular site is paid for, that's viewed as a lesser vote for the site that bought it. So in many cases, webmasters are asked to tag paid links with coding that will prevent them from passing search rank on to the sites that pay for them.

"In cases in which we feel that sites are attempting to use links to manipulate rankings, which includes the buying and selling of links for the clear purpose of passing PageRank, we make adjustments to counterbalance and also discourage those efforts," Google spokesman Eitan Bencuya told CNN. "At the end of the day though, we realize that our users must be able to consistently find relevant results whenever they search."

Matthews blogged about the "Findlaw PageRank sales scam" on August 13. Kevin O"Keefe followed up with FindLaw gaming Google, and possibly scamming lawyer customers? on August 17, saying "FindLaw appears to have been caught gaming Google by selling links to lawyer websites and, in the words of one blogger, possibly scamming their lawyer customers. The best summary is provided by Todd Friesen in an Aug. 13 post entitled 'Shame Shame Shame Findlaw.'

Full post as published by Larry Bodine's LawMarketing Blog on September 04, 2008 (boomark / email).