Yelp Sues Law Firm, McMillan Group, for Bogus Reviews

Not long ago I wrote a Search Engine Land post about a law firm suing their SEO for bad results . . . today bring us Yelp going after a law firm for posting fake reviews.  Having run marketing Avvo for about 5 years, I’ve seen all sorts of fake reviews (Avvo had, and I assume still has) a very strong algorithmic and human review spam process.  Yelp clearly has dealt with bogus reviews in the past without reaching for their lawyers.  I thought I’d dig in to see why they changed course this time . . .

Yelp goes after McMillan Group

San Diego based, McMillan Group  previously won a small claims suit against Yelp for a whopping total of $2,700.  The charge?  That  Yelp required an advertising contract in order for positive reviews to show up prominently on the company’s Yelp page.  Yelp is now coming back after the McMillan Group – citing a massive astroturfing (self-authored flattering reviews) campaign.  Essentially, Yelp claims the firm’s employees created new Yelp accounts for the sole purpose of writing one-off gushing 5 star reviews.  Many of the reviews track back to the same IP address, which coincidentally was also the firm’s IP address, (hmmmmm – not so smart McMillan Marketing staff).  In some  cases “unique” reviews were posted one after another and included exactly the same text.

Yelp has clearly dealt with bogus reviews in the past – there a few possible interpretations about why this review spat has been taken to this level:

  1. Yelp is bullying McMillan for the original lawsuit.
  2. Yelp is taking aggressive steps to protect the quality of their reviews.
  3. Yelp is seeking a PR counterpoint story to the “advertise with us or else. . . . ” news story that can’t seem to go away.
  4. The Yelp marketing department hates that McMillan has put the Yelp logo linking to a “Learn how we beat Yelp for their advertising practices” page on the Mcmillan.com homepage.

McMillan Homepage

 

Oh yes, and there’s Yelp again on a McMillan microsite (although it seems they haven’t been able to entirely figure out WordPress):

McM BK

 

Interestingly, I saw nothing but glowing 5 stars from 23 people on Google (although there was only 1 review on Avvo).

McMillan Google

 

Have some time and want to dig into the legal ramifications?  Here’s the complaint.

If I had to guess, I’d say this is a marketing tit for tat gone legal. All of this begs a very interesting question . . . other than the negative publicity, does this matter?  Do people  turn to Yelp when hiring an attorney?

Update:  Backlink Review

What would the backlink profile look like for a firm willing to astroturf reviews?  I took a cursory review at McMillan’s backlink profile.  Consider this a cautionary tale about how NOT to engage in linkspam.  According to open site explorer there are a 3,000 links from a whopping 2,000 different domains pointing to McMillan’s site.  Of those, the vast majority are evenly spread across anchor text with some variation of “san diego” + “bankruptcy attorney”  . . . 240 links with “san diego bankruptcy lawyers”, 240 links with “san diego bankruptcy attorneys”,   278 with “san diego bankruptcy lawyer” etc.

Now lets look at some of those links.

Spammy link tactic #1

Building single page “websites” on free website domains.  I counted 13 subdomains with links for McMillan on Weebly.  There are more linking subdomains on .beep, .webnode and others.

Spammy link tactic #2

Low quality directory submissions.  Here’s one of my favorites – a German website Webkatalog Firmen Anzeigenmarkt with this description of McMillan:

“It is required to have a lawyer Unless you have the time, patients, and understanding of the law to do it yourself. Here is why you need a Bankruptcy Law Firm San Diego. Better-quality San Diego bankruptcy law firm will advise you full fiscal session Facilitate and you build up a plan whichwill Certainly get the creditors off your back once and for ave McMillan Law Group will therefore take attention for all the paperwork and legal procedures Which are Merely too much to manage on your own.”

Spammy link tactic #3

Comment spam on subject-matter irrelevant blogs that don’t have no-follow attributes on comments.  According to OSE, somewhere hidden among the 7,137 other comments on this page on Dr.Dyslexia.com  is a link to McMillan.

Spammy link tactic #4

For a localized business, a reasonable proportion of links should be local – very few should be international on foreign language sites.  This is a very obvious and easy red flag to ID.  For McMillan, I found links on sites in Spanish, Chinese, German and more.

The Lesson Here

This post might sound a little mean spirited, but consider it a great example to NOT emulate with regards to link acquisition.  The real reason:  despite all that keyword rich anchor text, a Google search for “san diego bankruptcy attorney” didn’t return McMillan until deep into page 2 and they were nowhere to be found in the local (mapped) results either.

The irony, of course, is with all of this Yelp publicity, McMillan is going to build a slew of genuinely high quality links; unfortunately they’ll all be going to a domain that is probably unsalvageable.

Lawyers: Your Email Marketing Channel (Might) be Dead

In May, Google started rolling out a new interface for gmail  that organized email into five different buckets, accessed via tabs  – including one marked “promotional”.   The promotional category includes all email focused on deals, offers and almost everything sent en masse from email service providers.  This new interface is being rolled out to Gmail’s 126 million US subscribers.

Gmail Tabs

Make now doubt about it – email – the super low cost, high ROI channel, is now less effective.  (The cynic in me suggests that Google’s move is part user experience and part an attempt to shift yet more ad dollars to different channels, like . . . . PPC.)

So far, email marketing companies have predictably downplayed the impact of the changes to email campaigns.  Constant Contact SEO Gail Goodman acknowledged “small decreases in open rates among Gmail users.”  MailChimp published an early study indicating a drop in click through rates of 7-8%.  Note that this was conducted at the end of July – at that point it is unclear (I think) how widespread the rollout of the new interface was – so these numbers may be extremely optimistic.

It will be interesting to see how users adapt to the new interface over time – will they forgo the “promotions” tab altogether, or flock there when in a “purchasey” mood – as some email marketers have suggested.  Hard to say – my personal suspicion is that we are seeing the beginning of a huge decline in the volume of marketing emails and a very heavy push towards high quality.  I simply can’t imagine ever opening a second mailbox at the end of the driveway that was stuffed with nothing but the weekly circulars from the local grocery stores.

What to Do?

If your firm has an active email list here are some ways you may be able to earn yourself into the primary tab – or at least minimize the impact of being shunted into a bucket with  Hawaiian timeshares, housecleaning services and adult dating sites.

  1. Focus on engaging subject lines.
  2. Abandon the canned, mass email content from legal email marketers that is recycled among all of their other clients.
  3. Segment your users (and your email content, subject lines) so you are speaking as closely to each customer’s interests as possible.
  4. Abandon the volume perspective – because email is so cheap to send, it encourages quantity instead of quality.  Reverse that mindset and don’t send anything if you don’t have anything interesting to send.
  5. If all else fails – ask users directly to be moved into their “primary” tab.

 

 

You are Foolish if you run Google Adwords but not Bing Ads

Bing vs. Adwords
Out with Captain Dan.

I went striped bass fishing in Cape Cod last week aboard the Salt Shaker.  Captain Dan, who has been fishing there for about 30 years, has intimate experience with fish, tackle, currents, temperatures and the bay; which means that I’ve pulled in some big stripers each of the last 6 years I’ve been out with him.

It turns out Dan is an experienced, savvy online marketer as well.  On the 45 minute ride back from the fishing area, I asked him about how he markets his one man charter business. What follows is a rough recollection of his comments about PPC advertising.

“I used to spend a lot of money on Google – but that stuff is expensive.”

“A lot of what I paid for were marketers clicking through and trying to sell me stuff – I know that b/c I used a different email.”

“With Bing, I’m paying about a quarter of what I did on Google.”

And he’s right – the economics of pay per click advertising mean that the return on investment for Bing will outperform Google.  Here’s why: In the PPC bidding system price impacts not only who wins, but also how much they win. Simply put – because web searchers tend to click on things higher up on the page, buying your way to the top means you’ll get more clicks.  This means that PPC traffic is one of the few items with negative economies of scale – where the more you buy, the higher the per item costs.  And the more bidders there are in the system, the higher that price goes. This is exacerbated by attorneys who have translated 3 years of get-to-the-top-of-the-class education to ridiculous, irrational PPC bidding wars.

Because Google is the dominant search engine, most small businesses dip their toe in the  PPC waters with Adwords, not Bing Ads. At the risk of stretching the metaphor too far – they are fishing where the fish are.  And this seems to make sense – but because the market is so crowded with all the other small businesses doing the same, the economics don’t pan out as well.  Essentially, while there is more volume of searchers at Google, the crowded marketplace makes each of these searchers more expensive to buy.

So, if you are running Adwords and not Bing Ads, you are flushing money down the toilet. You will get less volume at Bing – but it will cost much less per click – in Captain Dan’s case, about 75% less.  And this is the key to ROI. To make things even easier – Bizible has just launched a free tool that will auto-tag a Bing advertising account with Google Analytics tracking code. Get started.

Hey Lawyers: Be (Very) Careful With Retargeting

I happened to glance at the screen while my 5 year old daughter was playing virtual dress-up.

Legal Retargeting

Hello “Goldberg Jones – Divorce for Men”.  Nice to meet you.  Actually, nice to get reacquainted with you.

My daughter is getting these ads because I was on Goldberg Jones’ site last week researching some duplicate content issues.  And now the web thinks I’m thinking of going single.  And so does my daughter . . . and when she logs onto our shared computer, so does my wife.

Due to all of the legal searches I do . . . the search engines and advertisers think I’m a drunk driving tax evader with mesothelioma whose wife is about to leave me before I’m deported.

And these ads are going to follow my wife around the web for the next 30 to 90 days.  Let’s say she spends her free time looking at pictures of cute fuzzy seals . . .

Legal Retargeting III

 

Or oggling David Beckham in his one-size-too-small undies . . .

Legal Retargeting

You get the point.

Now of course in theory, users can change their privacy settings to (mostly) avoid retargeted advertising; however, we all know that in reality many users fail to do so.

Retargeting is a very effective advertising tool.  It sells Nikes, trips to France, car insurance and even SEO Agency services.  I’ve helped many of my clients implement retargeting – but, given the nature of legal work – retargeting should be considered very carefully.  Retargeting is a marketing channel that some practice areas should just steer clear of.