Avvo’s Win for Free Speech – anti-SLAPP law

Posted on February 12, 2015 at 7:07 pm.

In a win for free speech, courts used antiSLAPP law to slap a plaintiff for attempting to chill Avvo’s right for free speech. The lawsuit, which goes back year to my own days at Avvo, was filed by a Florida based attorney claiming punitive and exemplary damages as well as attorneys fees on four seperate claims against Avvo.

Avvo argued that this was an attempt by the attorney to chill free speech and access to the information brought forth by the company on the website.

The case was quickly transferred to Washington state and as the slow wheels of justice turned, the courts granted a motion to dismiss. The kicker, however, is that under anti-SLAPP, the court can automatically impose a statutory damage award of $10,000 AND may award the defendants attorneys’ fees be paid by the plaintiff or the plaintiff’s attorneys. In this case the plaintiff was stuck with a $10,000 penalty and almost $50,000 in attorneys fees.

Essentially, we now have a precedent where the threat of a nuisance lawsuit brought specifically to silence an online voice now includes a significant financial risk for the plaintiff. The loser pays and the public wins.

7 Traits of Our Most Successful Clients in 2014

Posted on January 6, 2015 at 6:23 pm.

Written by Conrad Saam

Now is the time of year for legal marketing experts to cement their expert reputation by offering prognostications on the whims of Google in 2015. I thought I’d offer a different take on 2015 by highlighting the traits of 2014, common to our most successful clients.

Last year, we worked with 69 companies – from multi-national firms to part time solos. Some of them were very successful. Some of them (really) struggled. What follows are lessons gleaned from the top 15 of those firms who really nailed it last year.

They Focus on Conversion More than Marketing

(Or more accurately – they know that improving conversion is the best marketing investment you can make.)

While lawyers may not understand the concepts of canonical tags or H1s, they do immediately recognize great customer service. Further, customer service (which begins with an extremely positive intake process) is something a firm partner has direct control over.
Successful firms don’t see their front desk as a gatekeeper to the attorneys’ offices, but instead as a welcoming committee that is professional, caring, available and polite. One lawyer insists on having a prim British accent (and accompanying professionalism) at his front desk. Another (PI guy) evaluates his front desk on their ability to have the prospect agree to an in-home meeting with an attorney who is literally in a Lincoln towncar on the way to that meeting by the end of that phone call.

They Engage With Their Marketing

One of the (many) dirty little secrets about online marketing for lawyers is that our clients can usually do a better job at the hard (at least hard for us) stuff than we can. The clients we saw consistently crushing it in the search engines were very actively engaged with the hardest, most creative, least certain aspects of SEO – content development, linkbuilding and review management. These were hands on clients who leveraged their expertise, network and established position of influence with our direction to deliver very successful SEO campaigns.

They Calculate Marketing Channel Effectiveness

Our best clients calculate marketing effectiveness by channel – and not just by asking prospects “where did you find us.” Through a combination of intelligent tracking infrastructure and onboarding management, they knew their cost per client by marketing channel – enabling us to have rational, math based decisions instead of emotive, theoretical debates. In many cases, we installed this infrastructure and the internal discipline to use it in order to make these math based conversations happen.
For one client we ran two simultaneous campaigns through a creative marketing concept for two very different practice areas. Each required a $20,000 proof of concept marketing investment. One was an utter belly flop – the other a run-away success. Had we been focused on debating the genius (or lack thereof) of the marketing concept instead of the business results, nothing ever would have happened.

They Don’t Have Social Media Consultants

Very successful attorneys recognize social media for what it is: a catalyst for their own personal networking. And they know that outsourcing personal networking just doesn’t work – either online or in person. Nor did they need to hire anyone to teach them to write in 140 characters or less. They never embraced the oft-touted fallacy that social media was going to drive search rankings or that prospective clients were going to tweet out their need for a DUI lawyer or begin their divorce process by announcing on Facebook their impending nuptial demise.

They (Often) Had Never Hired an SEO

There were a sprinkling of firms we worked with that had never ever hired an SEO before and started with old, somewhat dated site. Essentially – their backlink and content profiles were so squeaky clean, just by having done nothing, that a responsive website and a little professional guidance were all they needed to take off. Note that these were firms in niche practice areas (i.e. NOT Personal Injury) in secondary geographic markets – where a combination of simple best practices and white hat implementation were all that was needed to drive significant business.

They Work the Legal Directories

2014 was the year the legal directories took a jump up – specifically Avvo, FindLaw and Nolo – all of which benefited from Google algo changes this year. Successful firms didn’t see this as competition, but instead an opportunity to be leveraged through advertising and/or engagement.

They Don’t Care About Their Ranking

Speaking of search engines – our best clients never ever talked to us about where they ranked for whatever SEO phrase most heavily stroked their personal ego. They understood how search results are personalized and that the vast majority of converting traffic comes from the long tail and local. We deliberately parted ways with a few firms who were myopically more interested in a search engine rankings instead of getting their phone to ring. (And no – these things are not necessarily correlated.)

New Years is always a good time to reassess priorities – both personal and professional – mix in some of these lessons for your firm along with your January gym membership.

The Pigeon Mess . . .

Posted on August 1, 2014 at 4:56 pm.

Written by Conrad Saam

Last Thursday, Google quietly released a new algo update targeting improved search results that had a local component (i.e. almost all legal related searches). Note that Pigeon impacts both local and natural searches – so the reach for law firms is very significant. The early results are in to Pigeon and they aren’t pretty.

Here’s why:

Pigeon Favors Directories Over Law Firms

Like the most recent Panda algo update, Pigeon seems to have favored directories over the actual businesses in these directories. There is widespread agreement among local search geeks – Mihm, Blumenthal, Shotland and more that directories have indeed benefited. Andrew Shotland noted a 5-10% traffic increase for some of the directories he works with following Pigeon. Counterpoint: I pinged the guys at Avvo who didn’t acknowledge anything dramatic.

I should note that this direction continues to surprise me. Cutt’s has often made comments to the contrary so I see the possibility of a large reversal in the horizon (although I’ve been envisioning it unsuccessfully it for a while.) It is highly possible that Google’s focus on “brands” and the rewarding of brands in search results is to explain – i.e. the Avvo’s and FindLaw’s of the world have established brands while branding for law firms, especially small law firms is essentially impossible – especially as a computer would view a “brand.”

There’s also an argument (and I think a good one) that this update is a hastily rolled out response to Yelp’s recent sniveling about anti-trust . . . Pigeon, which rolled out just two weeks after the leaked TechCrunch article has very directly benefited Yelp.

Shake-up of Local Results in a Bad Way

In many cases, mapped results have changed almost completely. We’ve also seen the reduction of the frequency and sized of mapped results – i.e. some formerly mapped results don’t deliver at all and some seven packs have been replaced by three packs. I had one attorney call me insisting that his claimed Google profiles were no longer appearing and yet some unclaimed satellite offices had suddenly shown up in the mapped results.

Remergence of SPAM Results in Local Pack

Michael Ehline at the Circle of Legal Trust noted that Avvo was now showing up as a local personal injury law firm in Los Angeles. I dug in and found what looks to be an old spam tactic – piggybacking a local company to the strength of a large, relevant domain to win in local results. This is more widspread than this example – the travel site, Expedia is now a small hotel on Madison Avenue in New York . . . . at least according to Google maps.

I looked further into the los angeles PI example and found the following result. Note that both Avvo and Lawyers.com are listed as a mapped business for the “los angeles personal injury attorney” query. Also note that neither of them have a physical address and both of them have the identical phone number (which incidentally, you may not be shocked to learn, does NOT in fact ring to my old friends in Seattle.) Also note both of them (and Farar & Lewis) are keyword stacked with “Personal Injury Lawyer” in the name of the business . . . . another rudimentary local search no no.

You’d think that Google local results, with the focus on things like NAP consistency might be able to algorithmically detect that two different business within the same result have the exact same phone number. Apparently not. Ehline insists that this result didn’t exist before Pigeon – and I tend to believe him. The only thing he fears more than the Government removing his AR-15 is the Google removing his rankings. While clicks go through to the appropriate directory, the phone number doesn’t – a quick search on that number brought me to an instagram (yuk) account that was associated with . . . . a los angeles motorcycle accident attorney:

Hope you are proud of yourself, Attorney Robert Brenner – but don’t expect this flood of new business to last, after which it may well dry up forever. This is an old spam technique (and I won’t encourage it by telling you how) that Google’s quality update (read: Pigeon) re-enabled. Good job MountainView. This is why I believe Pigeon to be a hastily launched response to Yelp’s whinings and I would expect more turmoil as they work to (hastily) improve upon it.

The Worst Legal Marketing I’ve Seen

Posted on July 30, 2014 at 3:56 pm.

Written by Conrad Saam

What follows is the most abjectly stupid online marketing I’ve come across. From a company that really should know better.

I found a legal website proactively advertising the services of a direct and hated competitor.

Advertising simply does NOT belong on the website of any service provider. You don’t want someone considering hiring you for their car accident to get distracted by a display ad for Nikes, the new Toyota Camry, a WonderBra . . . or worse . . . your competitor (more on that later.) It seems pretty obvious . . . your site is there to sell your services and not generate some residual revenue as a publisher of display advertising.

Over the years, I’ve collected examples of law firm websites that contain third party display advertising . . . usually they are old, outdated or abandoned sites (frequently blogs). But sometimes they are a firm’s primary current site, hoping to generate a little extra income as a Google AdSense publisher. I’ve filed away a collection of screenshots with the intention of eventually writing this post; but just today I ran across something so spectacular that I dropped everything to write.

Check this out:

Ironically, the screenshot above is a “best marketing practices for small business” article from my good friends in Eagan, MN at FindLaw. And there, perched brazenly on the right rail, is an advertisement for Avvo’s Ignite product. Avvo, the company that has dethroned FindLaw – advertising directly on the FindLaw site. And as if it couldn’t get any better, the Avvo tagline reads:

“The antidote to clueless lawyer marketing.”

I can’t make this stuff up.

I know this is a mean-spirited post and generally I’m not so flagrantly cruel, but are you serious?

Now clearly, this is a remarketing campaign from Avvo and not a direct display ad buy. But, at the very least, it is mindnumbingly easy to exclude competitors’ advertisements on your own website with even the most rudimentary ad vendor. But really – this isn’t about appropriately configuring a website – its about recognizing that the primary objective of your site is to get people to engage with the services you provide – and ads on your site detract from that objective. So if this is in any way unclear: If you sell a service, third party advertisements do NOT belong on your website. Doing so enables your competitors to directly target your audience.

As for FindLaw . . . think very carefully before placing your marketing investment in the hands of a company so spectacularly inept that they display competitor’s advertisements on their own website. Clueless lawyer marketing indeed.

Latest Google Algo Change Hits Local: Pigeon

Posted on July 29, 2014 at 4:20 pm.

Written by Conrad Saam

Google local results have long been a mess; complicated by semi-annual rebranding. Frankly, local results have been a hodgepodge of mistakes and spam, so I’m not surprised to see an algo update – pushed out quietly late Thursday night.

What exactly changed? It’s very hard to say, as the announcement was phrased as the lovechild of geek and marketing speak that even I can’t decipher anything substantive:

“the new local search algorithm ties deeper into their web search capabilities, including the hundreds of ranking signals they use in web search along with search features such as Knowledge Graph, spelling correction, synonyms and more.”

They also announced improved signals around distance and location – which seems strange as that doesn’t seem like a very difficult factor to measure. The update is currently rolling out across the US – so you may see some variability within local search results in the upcoming week.

The Results so Far?

Early results indicate improved performance for major local directories which I find both surprising and disappointing, as it seems counterintuitive to the entire concept of local search. You’ll remember that the results of the Panda 4.0 update were large improvements for Avvo. Given some of Cutt’s comments, I’ve long believed that Google will back off the directories in favor of smaller businesses. The directory angle may be a response to Yelp’s recently leaked anti-trust whinings pointing out that even branded searches were failing to reach Yelp.

The Important Takeaways

Pigeon impacts both local AND natural search results – so for law firms, the overall impact may be fairly significant. Cross your fingers and watch your natural search traffic over the next two weeks.
Google remains in the middle of an anti-SPAM rampage. Combine that with the rampant spamming of localized results and I wouldn’t be surprised if Pigeon may also have teeth – negatively impacting those of you (and yes there are lots of you) who are faking your office locations – to the detriment of your actual office location. (This is 100% conjecture.)
Care about your Yelp profile . . . . I hate to say it (and never advertise with them) but customers vetting lawyers may increasingly be led to Yelp.

How to Buy A Top 10 Attorney Award (and Link) from The American Institute of Personal Injury Attorneys

Posted on June 11, 2014 at 6:41 pm.

Written by Conrad Saam

Got another call from a client . . . a big client with lots of lawyers . . . asking me about one of his brand spanking new attorneys who has just been bestowed an award as a Top 10 Personal Injury Attorney in his state by The American Institute of Personal Injury Attorneys.

My clients question?

“I’m not sure I really get this, he’s not even a top 10 attorney in our firm, let alone the entire state.”

The nomination came along with the request to send a check for $275 within the next month and information on where the AIPIA site should link to.

American Institute of Personal Injury Attorneys

So, I thought I’d do some digging on the esteemed American Institute of Personal Injury Attorneys. According to their site, they have pretty stringent requirements for admittance, so it was odd that a wet-behind-the-ears, unpublished, unrated, unknown junior associate had made it past this evaluation gauntlet.

Very few Attorneys can display our “10 Best” Badge on their website or Plaque in their office. AIOPIA has a stringent and multi-phased Selection Process which begins with peer nomination and ends with final approval by our Board of Regents.

Having had some experience with manufactured awards during the early days of Avvo, this started to smell familiar. (No word on exactly who sits on this vaunted Board of Regents.)

The award list pages for attorneys who have made it through the AIPIA’s stringent process does include a few firms (along with some followed links). Here’s New York for example (note that if there are still slots available, you too can be considered for Top 10 status, hurry and get those nominations and checks in . . . )

So exactly who/what is the American Institute of Personal Injury Attorneys (and do you think they’d accept yours truly on their Board of Regents)? The “About Us” page didn’t offer much beyond self congratulatory marketing copy:

Membership is an exclusive honor and extended only to those select few who have reached the top of their profession while doing so with the client’s satisfaction being of the most paramount importance.

Blah Blah Blah

Maybe their office location will be a little more insightful . . . so I fired up Google Street View and found the headquarters of the American Institute of Personal Injury Attorneys located . . .

Great – you can presumably celebrate with a congratulatory cheeseburger and coke next door if you pick up your plaque in person. And don’t worry if you aren’t a PI lawyer . . . located within that same UPS store, you can find the American Institute of DUI/DWI Attorneys as well. Perhaps they’ll soon create The American Institute of Legal SEO Consultants and I too can have a Top 10 Badge.

The Link Ramifications

This might seem like an easy way to buy links(and a plaque), but . . . .

These types of sites are exactly what searches engines look for algorithmically – domains with no authority (both American Institute pages have Page Rank of zero) containing pages with nothing but lists of businesses with followed links. I can’t promise that these specific sites would trip a search engine red flag, but I’d steer all of my clients away from something like this.

I’ll let you guys ruminate on the ethical ramifications of these awards . . . .

UPDATE: The National Academy of Personal Injury Attorneys

Oh this gets even better. Someone just forwarded me a link to The National Academy of Personal Injury Attorneys. Are these two vicious competitors? I don’t think so – the NAPIA is built on the exact same website platform, with the exact same award structure (Top 10 and Top 10 Under 40) and essentially the same nomination and vetting process as the AIPIA. Are they located in the same UPS store as The American Institute of Personal Injury Attorneys? Nope – the NAPIA is housed in virtual office space on K Street, a short 5 minutes from the headquarters of the AIPIA Headquarters/UPS Store.

I’m off to take a very hot shower and gargle some bleach.

FindLaw Websites Crushed by Panda 4

Posted on May 23, 2014 at 5:31 pm.

Written by Conrad Saam

On Tuesday, I posted about Google’s roll-out of Panda 4 – an algorithm update targeting spammy, thin, duplicative content and postulated that this was going to really shake up the legal industry. It turns out, that was an understatement. Early results are showing that this algo update has had the largest ever impact across the legal industry.

The algo changes start with my friends in Eagen, Minnesota at FindLaw (and unfortunately, probably many of their website clients).

FindLaw.com Decimated by Panda 4

I was curious to see what happened to FindLaw’s traffic after Panada 4 rolled out, as the legal SEO industry has been vocally critical of Google for seeming to turn a blind eye to FindLaw tactics that flagrantly flaunt search engine best practices. To date, none of the algo updates or Penguin penalties seem to have had a massive or persistent impact on either the FindLaw site or their law firm clients’ websites. The early data suggests that has changed drastically with Panda 4:

Check out the massive drop in the past few days – FindLaw plummeting to traffic levels lower than they’ve seen in many years. Why did this happen? Attorney, Damon Chetson described it best (and foreshadowed this week’s impact of Panda) in a post from January: FindLaw Getting Penalized for SEO Abuse.

“FindLaw was “good” at creating a lot of content, most of it junk, that it could repackage and sell across websites and markets.”

This type of pervasive, thin, low quality content across a network of sites is exactly what the Panda algo updated was designed to detect and push users away from.

What Happened to Avvo?

After I saw this massive hit FindLaw’s traffic, my next stop was to check out Avvo. (Full disclosure – I’m still a shareholder in Avvo, so I’m hardly writing from a dis-interested perspective here.) Turns out Avvo didn’t get hit. At all. The Alexa graph below shows business as usual for Avvo.

In fact, legal marketer Shelly Fagin is reporting on some impressive gains for Avvo.

I’m seeing Panda 4.0 bumped down lots of lawyers positions for Avvo which now has a top SERP in most all our major search terms.

And the data I’m tracking suggests Shelly is entirely accurate. Below you’ll see a sampling of ranking data on 1,500 different highly competitive head terms (like “Seattle Divorce Lawyer”) and the changes in incidence in Top 3 ranking for both FindLaw and Avvo. While FindLaw’s appearance in the top 3 results has dropped by 44%, Avvo exploded by 210% and they are now dominating FindLaw on these highly converting (i.e. prospects making phone calls to lawyers) terms.

These changes are a big deal for the legal industry as a whole. In 2006, I was part of a small group of people trying to use the web to bring consumers closer to the legal profession. Just eight years later – it looks like Avvo not only joined the big leagues, but is now the only major player left standing – martindale.com and lawyers.com have long been relegated to traffic irrelevance and now with Panda 4, FindLaw has joined them.

What to Expect If You are Advertising on Avvo or FindLaw

If the data above is indicative of FindLaw and Avvo’s performance overall, advertisers are going to start seeing a huge change in return on investment for their marketing spend. As both Avvo and FindLaw essentially monetize their SEO performance as ads – I’d predict inbound traffic and call volume from FindLaw is going to crater. And if the data is correct (and the trend holds) I’d anticipate Avvo advertising rates to increase in about 3 months.

FindLaw Lawyer Websites Hit by Panda 4

My bigger concern is not really with the FindLaw domain overall, but their law firm clients who may have been negatively impacted by the tactics employed by their provider. Did FindLaw website clients get hit too? This is a little harder to diagnose, as most attorney sites are far too small to register on traffic reporting sites like Alexa. BUT . . . anecdotally the answer seems to be yes. Here are two data points:

1. FindLaw’s Pre-SEO’d Websites Hit

The day before the announcement of Panda 4, I wrote a post about FindLaw’s pre-built, pre-SEO’d sites . . . essentially websites being sold to Lawyers that were already ranking for highly competitive terms. Seems like many FindLaw lawyer websites have disappeared entirely. The examples I used – longislanddwilawyer.org, and lasvegas-duilawyer.com – which ranked on the first page for their respective key terms “geo _ dwi/dui lawyer” at the beginning of the week are no longer to be found in the search results. Hand checking in on many other FindLaw sites shows the have disappeared too. In a post today, A to Z Lawyer Marketing reports:

Well google just unveiled Panda 4.0 and it took FindLaw’s entire low quality network with it. Hundreds of FindLaw sites have vanished from the SERP.

2. Forum Comments

Forum comments on the FindLaw’s Pre-SEO’d Websites Post anecdotally corroborate the data above:

If you suspect your FindLaw website has been hit by Panda . . . despair. But just for a little while. Then think about what makes Panda tick – that thin, recycled, low quality content. Getting out of a Panda penalty is hard (and expensive) but is achievable. Check the stipulations of your FindLaw contract and thank your lucky stars this isn’t a Penguin issue where recovery is a much fuzzier, much harder, much more expensive. If you are considering finding a new website or SEO provider, check out the FindLaw Jailbreak Guide.

Panda 4.0 Update – Lawyers Edition

Posted on May 21, 2014 at 4:58 pm.

Written by Conrad Saam

Did your front desk phone stop ringing suddenly today?

Yesterday Google announced the launch of Panda 4.0 update – an update designed to further strengthen the quality of content they drive users to. (Read that backwards: Google is taking even more aggressive steps to filter out sites that deliver low quality garbage content.)

While this is an on-going roll-out, some results are already in and they are striking.

Alan Bleiweiss (as far as I’m concerned the web’s best Forensic SEO auditor) shared the Google Analytics data below showing just how massive an impact Panda can have on some sites. What’s interesting in this case – its a client dealing with multiple algo penalties that has now cleaned up their act and under Alan’s guidance is played the game correctly and is seeing a massive upside from the Panda 4.0 roll-out.

What Panda 4 Means For Lawyers

The legal industry is probably one of the worst offenders when it comes to low end content – driven heavily by the “content content content” call that was drummed by the SEO industry eager to sell lawyers blogging platforms and posts. Given the extent of what we’ve seen from people like Alan and the incredibly heavy buzz this has generated among SEO geeks, I’d expect to see a very heavy impact to the legal industry. Legal marketer, Shely Fagin has already reporting a heavy improvement in rankings for Avvo (this has NOT been confirmed by my old friends at Avvo, but frankly doesn’t surprise me as from my past experience I know they have a huge commitment to quality content.)

What to Do

Strap in and watch your Google Analytics account. If you’ve been outsourcing content abroad, spinning content, paying anyone less than $20 a post, or have content developed by one of the big box providers – I’d be very concerned. Make sure you know how to generate a filter to look only at “non-paid search traffic” (image below) and look for big changes. I generally recommend patience – but this is a big shift and unfortunately you might now being paying the price for a hiring a low quality vendor.

FindLaw Selling Pre-SEO’d Websites

Posted on May 20, 2014 at 6:34 pm.

Written by Conrad Saam

Want to rank #1 for a highly competitive search term immediately? FindLaw has your answer.

FindLaw is now offering pre-built Websites – essentially high ranking law firm websites with no owner – being sold to the highest bidder. And by “high ranking” I mean high ranking in the search engines.

Here’s excerpts from a FindLaw email forwarded to me by a lawyer wondering how much he should pony up for a site that was already a ranking winner:

look at this link and let me know what you think once you open the first organic (under top PPC adds). This is just a sample of our pre-built DUI Sites that we recently released. We only sell 2 state wide for every state. Why not consider being # 1 organically. . .”

What the what?

What is a pre SEO’d Website?

Now its unclear from the email above exactly what “pre-built” websites actually means – but the explicit message here is that a firm can purchase a website from FindLaw that already ranks. And ranks #1 for very competitive terms. The sales pitch is very compelling – we already rank #1 . . . see right here?

And lawyers bit. Here’s one of those pre-built, pre-SEO’d websites live and kicking and rented by attorney Erik Zentz. Yes – just <insert handsome attorney picture here>. DUI in Vegas – I wonder how deep Erik’s pockets are?

And this approach seems to be working well for FindLaw and their clients. Here’s Zentz winning the competitive query “Las Vegas DUI Lawyer”. (And I can’t tell you the rash it gives me that a FindLaw site is outranking Avvo’s results – which come in at #2.)

I wanted to know exactly what a pre-built website was, so I checked out lasvegas-duilawyer.com on the wayback machine. Turns out, just last year there was an entirely different law firm on that domain: Kajioka and Bloomfield.

So what happened to Kajioka and when? Here’s the site on the wayback machine from January of this year – notice the firm name and contact information have been stripped. I can’t possibly imagine a worse user experience for someone in desperate need of a lawyer stumbling across a placeholder website ranking #1 in a highly targeted search result.

And now Eric Zentz owns rents the domain that Kajioka and Bloomfield presumably paid to have FindLaw build and optimize for them – including all of the legacy blog content and . . . links. Yup – despite the fact that Zentz started on the domain just this year, “his” blog posts stretch back well into the first quarter of last year and have the exact same content from the Kajioka era. Explains how he’s been able to rank #1 for a super competitive term in less than 3 months. And not to miss a black hat beat, FindLaw made sure to establish authorship for Eric . . . for pre-existing blog posts written long before he was their client. Note the date below . . .

I’ll leave you lawyers and bar reps to chime in on the ethics of this.

So pre-built actually means “recycled” or “rented” or “sold to the highest bidder” or “author spam” or perhaps all of the above.

What absolutely floors me is that Koijaka and Bloomfield have kept their website with FindLaw – although they don’t appear anywhere in search results (at least for me) for that coveted term – “las vegas dui lawyer”.

I wonder who is paying more to the piper?

More Examples

Is Zentz an isolated incidence? Not so fast – through a little backlink analysis I stumbled into a slew of sites – ChicagoLegalAuthority.com, NewYorkLegalAuthority.com etc, PhiladelphiaLegalAuthority.com etc. The whois record for these domains comes up not as FindLaw, but rather as DNStination Inc. in San Francisco, which is, according to Domain Name Strategy, “a profile often used by corporate registrar MarkMonitor to ‘mask’ domain ownership on behalf of their clients.” But the anchor text heavy links on these sites point almost exclusively to lawyer websites that are — you guessed it — FindLaw clients. Of the links on Chicago Legal Authority’s Featured Personal Injury Attorneys (below), seven out of nine of them were to law firms paying FindLaw for their websites – and look at that anchor text whoooo!

And – to close the loop – the New York Legal Authority site included an anchor text heavy link to LongIslandDwILawyer.org – which, although registered to Domains by Proxy (hidden), is built on the same exact template as our original example: Zentz.

Another ownerless site – the phone number I called on the contact page of these ownerless sites went to a nondescript voicemail – no name, no law firm name, nothing – how is that for quality results? BUT – someone is still publishing content on the domain – at least 5 blog posts so far this month.

. . . . and yup, you guessed it . . . the Long Island DWI site returns on page one of Google search results for that money term . . . .”long island DWI Lawyer.”

*sigh*

So if you live in Long Island and practice DWI, give your FindLaw rep a call . . .