Legal Writing

Law Firm Web Sites, SEO, Reprint Rights, Acrobat, and Photocopiers

I’m doing some research for an article I’m writing when I find this article (“Lawyers, Laptops, and the Border” published by the Texas Bar Journal) republished by a law firm (the firm of the author of the article).

The first page looks great, but there’s something strange about the second page — the type looks fuzzy. The page is an image!

The next two pages look good, but then there’s another page that’s an image, and another. What the heck?

And then it comes to me. The pages that are images have been altered. The ads that appeared on them have been removed. In the process (the wrong one to use), the pages became images.

Does it matter? You bet, and here’s why.

The firm republished the article to help attract prospects (via the magical powers of SEO). There just might be someone out there searching for information on “lawyers facing border searches,” and republishing the article means that that someone (a potential client, perhaps?) might discover the firm and that could make the article very worthwhile.

Ah . . . the wonders of SEO . . . .

But that someone isn’t going to discover the firm because a search for “lawyers facing border searches” won’t reveal the article. The page containing that phrase is an image, rather than text. So far as search engines are concerned, that page is a blank page.

And blank pages (blank to search engines, that is) have no SEO value at all.

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Some law firms don’t know all the ins and outs of publishing. Or maybe they do, but they’re trying to hide something.

Let me show you what I mean. Consider this article (“The fine art of actually collecting legal fees” published by the National Law Journal) republished by a law firm (the firm of the author of the article).

It’s a photocopy of the original!

Now . . . why would a law firm republish a low-res photocopy of an article when it can publish a high-quality reprint of the article?

I can think of two reasons:

1. The firm can’t afford reprint rights and wants to hide the fact that it’s republishing NLJ articles without permission, or
2. The firm doesn’t realize that it needs to secure reprint rights from the publisher.

Since it’s a photocopy, the NLJ can’t rely on search engines to see if the article’s been republished.

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Try this. Do a search for The financial reform law signed into law. Put the phrase in quotes (and don’t include the period).

If you use Google to do the search, there are nine results, each beginning with the phrase The financial reform law signed into law by President Barack Obama on July 21. And they all point to the NLJ article.

Fine!

Now search for as money flows into nonprofits. The only result is this article published by the San Francisco Business Times.

Compare that article to this one.

The latter is a photocopy of the original, and that’s why it doesn’t show up in the search results — so far as Google is concerned, it’s a blank page.

In fact, the page is so blank it cannot be discovered by potential clients or the publisher that holds the copyright to the article (American City Business Journals, known to actively search for copyright violations).

The SEO value of a photocopied article is nil.

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I’ll say it again — attorneys who don’t ever bother to look at their firms’ web sites are not practicing the sort of due diligence they claim to use in all they do.

I believe that’s not wise.

Full post as published by Set in Style on July 23, 2010 (boomark / email).