Panda 4.0 Update – Lawyers Edition

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

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 . . .

Legal Marketing in 2014: The Only Thing You Need to Know

Posted on January 7, 2014 at 3:40 pm.

Written by Conrad Saam

Now is the time of year when professional predictions, resolutions and prognostications appear across the legal marketing blogging landscape. In the ever-changing SEO industry, correctly guessing the newest new thing is very effective.

As far as I’m concerned there’s only one thing you need to know about online marketing in 2014: Matt is mad.

In 2013, the head of Google’s anti-webspam team (and unofficially, chief industry PR spokesperson), Matt Cutts, hammered the SEO industry with anit-spam algorithm updates. And while Google started sharing these algo code name updates back in 2011; through 2013 we saw these names go from project code names whispered about at geek conferences into brand names, with careful, proactive PR launches. Pandas and Penguins and Hummingbirds. Oh My!

Traditionally, Google’s anti-spam PR approach has been to single out individuals – JC Penney’s, BMW etc. – and make an example of them. And while there will continue to be individual examples, what we are now seeing is much more widespread. This accelerated towards the end of the year with widespread algo changes and very public warnings about guest blogging, thin authorship and a litany of link scheme busts. Here are some (non-animal branded) announcements from December 2013 alone:

Google Has Officially Penalized Rap Genius for Link Schemes

Matt Cuts Implies Google is Aware of SEOs Bribing Bloggers

Google Reduces Authorship Rich Snippets in Search Results

Google Squashes Backlinks.com – Another Link Network Outed by Google

Google’s Matt Cutts: Guest Blogging Abuse SPAM on the Rise

Google Busts Yet Another Link Network – Anglo Rank

Google’s Matt Cutts: Stitching Content is Bad SEO Quality Content

Google Mindset Shift

Most interesting was a shift in mindset publicly espoused by Google. Generally, given their vast reach and power – we seen amicable Matt speaking reasonablly gently about these issues. So I was very surprised to run across Cutts in a December 4, This Week in Google video, in a carefully worded statement saying:

“We want to break [spammers] spirits.”

Barry Schwartz has a detailed review of the video on Search Engine Land – here are some of the key excerpts:

“If you want to stop spam, the most straight forward way to do it is to deny people money because they care about the money and that should be their end goal. But if you really want to stop spam, it is a little bit mean, but what you want to do, is sort of break their spirits.”

SPAM and the Legal World in 2013

Aggressive and enterprising lawyers tend to be some of the more aggressive spammers – rivaling offshore porn, pills and poker. In 2013, the third largest legal industry centric link buying scheme was quietly taken down (interestingly – to the best of my knowledge this hasn’t been reported anywhere.) I don’t know if that was a manual change made by Google or if it was caught up in a larger algo update. And remember lawyers – I’m talking to more and more of you coming up with various office sharing schemes to try to artificially expand your footprint in Google local results. If you want to stay around for a while, open up a real office. David Mihm’s 2013 Local Optimization Ranking Factors Survey identified the number one negative ranking factor: Listing Detected at False Business Location.

So – Atticus’ predictions for 2014?

As a whole, the legal industry will experience a heavy shake-up with regards to who generates business from the web. “Penalty Recovery” will become a staple of the legal SEO agency world as law firms flee the large spammy, legally focused SEO agencies/consultants/website providers.

The Power of Promoting (Good) Content

Posted on December 11, 2013 at 7:37 pm.

Written by Conrad Saam

A few months ago I wrote a diatribe proclaiming SEO Regicide – the Death of Content the King. The concept was fairly simple – there are so many lawyers vomiting (bad) content across the web, that building content, in and of itself, is not sufficient for driving traffic (and therefore business) from the web. The conclusion was that the new King of SEO is the marketing and distribution of great content. Simple premise – but not immediately (or perhaps ever) scaleable.

Now let me share some great data to validate the theory:

The graphic below depicts organic search traffic for a site whose only SEO tactic during the past 9 months has been the generation and distribution of very high quality content. While I generally wouldn’t recommend focusing on one search tactic, the firm is on a very solid technical platform and is in a maintenance mode. They have been publishing (and promoting) high quality, unique content from the writers at We Do Web Content on a regular basis.

The Results

That’s a 50% increase in traffic over a period of 9 months and demonstrates exactly what I want my clients to experience – slow, steady, predictable improvement in their site’s performance – which correlates to a slow steady increase in the volume of inbound phone calls. There’s no technical magic, no link-building shenanigans, no directory submissions needed.

I often am asked for a magic SEO bullet, when sometimes the foundational concepts are all you really need.

Escape FindLaw

Posted on November 7, 2013 at 4:07 pm.

Written by Conrad Saam

Considering leaving FindLaw for an effective SEO provider? Check the fine print in your contract to see just how difficult they’ve made it for you.

Domain Ownership

If you relied on Findlaw to register your domain, most likely they still actually own it. This means that your investment in SEO has been developing their business, not yours. This is the real estate equivalent of building a house on land you don’t own. Anticipate your “house” being sold to a competitor once you move out.

Content

All that beautiful (and expensive) content on your site? If you didn’t write it, its highly unlikely you own it. And if you are trying to escape, you’re going to have to leave it behind or cough up a hefty fee to buy your content back from them. If your content’s byline looks like the expert below, its probably not YOUR content.

FindLaw Contract

That long term contract you signed with FindLaw sentenced your firm to years of retainer fees. Its hard to escape, no matter how badly Penguin and Panda Google penalties may have decimated your website. Hint: the louder you complain (not to them, but in public) the more amenable they are to an early release.

Data

Don’t let FindLaw hold your Google Analytics data hostage as well. This is your information, not theirs, and something that shouldn’t be left behind. Insist on administrative access in Google Analytics – which enables your to add (and later delete) users. Failing to remove their access to Google Analytics after you’ve escaped means they can still review your data at will.

SEO Regicide: Content the King is Dead

Posted on October 31, 2013 at 4:07 pm.

Written by Conrad Saam

Content content content.

“You need more content.”

“You need to rewrite news articles every day!”

“You need to blog more.”

“Publish or perish.”

“Google launched Hummingbird – you need to write FAQs!”

Psssssst . . . . lawyers . . . all of the SEO experts are telling you (and all of your competitors) the same thing. And like compliant lemmings, you are all doing the same thing.

Psssssst . . . It doesn’t work anymore.

The Rise and Fall of the Content Dynasty

The genesis for the focus on content began about 5 years ago. Changes in consumer search behavior gradually took effect – whereby users began looking for increasingly specific answers with increasingly granular content pages. The “long tail” of search became the industry’s hottest new buzzword. SEO experts, ninjas, and mavens started churning out pages with very subtle differences – “Best Seattle underage DUI Attorney”, “Top 10 Settle teen DUI Attorneys” “Great Seattle Drunk Driving Lawyers for drivers under 21” ad nauseam. The industry adopted the boorish practice of rewriting news stories and vomiting them back onto blogs that quickly became poorly written rehasings of yesterday’s news.

And for a while it worked (at least in generating traffic for the SEO consultants to return triumphantly with “success metrics” for their misguided clients – the fact that the phone never rang didn’t seem to matter – but I digress, that is a topic for another post.) The legal industry became publishing sweatshops – with individual firms churning out hundreds, even thousands of articles a month.

Eventually, the search engines, as they always do, caught up with the SEO spammers. Penguins and Pandas and most recently, Hummingbirds were let lose on the algorithms. Content, the King, was under attack.

The Succession of the King: Quality Content

The search engine talking heads defended their King – retreating back to the ever-popular refrain – “write quality content and we will reward you with a bounty of traffic.”

So the SEO experts and mavens and ninjas did as they were told . . . infographics and guest blogging were born. Top 10 Lists proliferated like bunnies on a steady diet of Viagra. In time, most legally focused news stories was dissected and built into beautiful graphical statistical displays. Guest blog brokers were born. Just like with King Content, the disciples of his son, Quality Content initially did very well. But as others caught up, they became increasingly less effective. Because everyone was doing it.

So the search engines sent warnings about guest blogging. The cycle repeated itself again.

Quality Content is NOT Enough

This death of King Content and his prince son, Quality hit me square in the face a few weeks ago at Webcam – a small but amazing conference in Bend Oregon. Marshall Simmonds, who used to be the in-house SEO for the New York Times (arguably one of the most high quality original content publishers) heralded the end of a dynasty: Content is no longer King.

Eu Tu Simmonds?

And he’s right. We are now at a point in the evolution of the web where generating quality content is no longer sufficient for success. There’s frankly just too much of it. The trick, the real hard part of marketing, today’s unscaleable solution and the successor of the crown is marketing content. And by “marketing content” – I don’t mean “content marketing” – the aforementioned practice of vomiting out hoards of webpages. I literally mean undertaking marketing efforts to promote your quality content. This can take the shape of many different channels – social media, networking, the dubiously named “author rank” or even the marketing pariah of the SEO world – Public Relations. Marshall’s pronouncement was utterly confirmed for me when I looked at the referring traffic for some legal sites and found that Press Release providers (PRWeb etc.) frequently showed up as the #1 referring site. For years, I have mocked the press release tactic as a dying relic of yesteryear – but I’ve been wrong – because now, the genuine distribution of content is what makes the magic happen.

The reality is that the Quality Content mantra assumed that when you have quality content, links are going to happen. This is no longer universally true – especially in hypercroweded content landscapes like legal. To be successful, you must embrace proactively marketing that very good, high quality content.

Content is dead, long live Content.

Your Legal Blog Content Isn’t As Good As You Think It Is

Posted on October 28, 2013 at 3:52 pm.

Written by Conrad Saam

I made an error in Atticus’ initial approach to identifying (and reporting on) a very simple success metric for our clients: traffic. Turns out, all traffic is not created equal – specifically traffic to blog content is (usually) much less valuable than other traffic.

How have the SEO’s been steering us wrong all this time? Let me use me use Google Analytics to review Atticus’ own traffic to demonstrate my point:

First, I’m going to filter my traffic in Google Analytics by selecting only non-paid search traffic.

Now I’m going to look at my site’s most effective landing pages in the Landing Pages report.

Now look at the content that draws in traffic – outside of my homepage (which is essentially branded traffic – people who already know me and are actively looking for me), its all blog posts I’ve written about online marketing which contain instructions, news items and search theory pontifications. A full 20% of my inbound traffic goes to a blog post I wrote on “how to check your access level in the new google analytics interface.” The likelihood that one of those users is an attorney actively looking to hire an SEO Agency is exactly zero.

I have to scroll and scroll through different landing pages before I finally find a page that generates high converting traffic (the legal equivalent of a Practice Area description page.)

This represents a whopping 0.4% of my search traffic and 0.1% of my total traffic. Now, in my situation, this is not a concern as the objective of my blog is to reinforce my credibility with industry leaders not generate new business. However, if I was an attorney who relied on the web for my business’ growth, this is a very concerning statistic. And unfortunately, many SEO consultants and website vendors mask poor business performance with pretty reports of overall traffic growth. Want to see a nice growth graph that hides the fact my traffic isn’t making my phone ring? – below is the graph that shows my site’s performance looks like overall. Note this is driven heavily by inbound traffic to pages that do NOT generate any business.

The notion that vomiting out barely tangentially related content on a blog (and the associated traffic bump) to generate traffic is the panacea of legal marketing is utterly misleading. Beware SEO consultants who push clients to write in order to overshadow poor website performance. Instead, take the time to look into those high converting pages of your site – and see how much traffic they are generating. Those are the pages that make your phone ring.

LawyerEdge Website Underperforming? A Cautionary Tale of Duplicate Content

Posted on September 19, 2013 at 5:52 pm.

Written by Conrad Saam

Having trouble figuring out why your website isn’t getting more traffic? Its possible the content on your site has simply been cut and pasted from another site – rending your SEO impotent.

Law Firm Website Almost Invisible

Initially, I couldn’t figure out why the law firm’s site was performing so badly – the technology was fine, the content seemed fairly well written and there was a reasonable link profile. Despite this, the site was averaging less than 2 visitors a day from unbranded natural search – and very few of those visitors were landing on the practice area pages. Digging deeper, I found that the actual content on the practice area pages was cut and pasted across other LawyerEdge clients.

In the example below – we can see that Google has identified 58 other pages with the exact same content as this law firm’s page for pedestrian knock down accidents.

When I looked across the website’s landing pages, I found that almost all of them had content that was duplicated across the web. In the graph below, the vertical axis shows the number of pages found on the web containing the exact same content as the law firm’s topic pages.

Of the 40 pages I reviewed, just 13 had unique content.

Understanding Duplicate Content

Search engines hate duplicate content because it can generate a really bad user experience. Here’s why: Using the above example, imagine I do a Google search for “determining who is negligent in Pedestrian cases”. The first result I click to doesn’t give me what I’m looking for, so I click back to the search engine and try the second result . . . . which leads me to the exact same content on another site. Now I’m annoyed and instead of clicking back, I load up Bing to try to find something different.

The search engines minimize this poor user experience by identifying duplicate content across different pages and trying to identify the original version of the content (search geeks refer to this as the canonical). Google and bing hide the other pages away from searchers in what is called “supplemental results” – which is of course, where I eventually found the law firm’s pages. Supplemental results are shown here:

This is compounded when a large portion of a site’s content looks to be simply copied and pasted from other sites across the web. Search engines reasonably deduce that the overall site is of pretty low quality wrt to unique, interesting content. Google’s algorithm updated to try to identify (and weed out) these sites with the Panda update. From the Google blog:

“This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful.”

Note that Panda is a site-wide penalty – which means that duplicate content on many pages will impact performance of the entire site – even those deliciously well written unique and insightful pages. The bar graph above, which shows the majority of the law firm’s pages having duplicate content indicates they have most likely been hit by the Panda update.

In the pedestrian knockdown practice area example, all of the firms listed below are competing directly with each other with the exact same content:

Rochelle McCullough, LLP
Inkelaar Law
Eshelman Legal Group
Joshua D. Earwood
Saladino Oakes & Schaaf
Levenbaum Trachtenberg
Ellis, Ged & Bodden
Law Office of Bruce D. Schupp
Allen, Allen, Allen & Allen
Law Office of Kenneth G. Miller
The Law Firm of Kevin A. Moore, P.A.
Buchanan & Buchanan
S. Perry Penland, JR.
Ardoin Law Firm
McWard Law Office
LeBell Dobroski Morgan Meylink LLP
Cox & Associates, P.A.
The Gefen Law Firm
Echemendia Law Firm PA
McKinney Braswell Butler LLC
Law Office of Charney & Roberts
Johnson & Associates
Pistotnik Law Offices
Bledsoe Law Office
Law Offices of George A. Malliaros
Roberts, Miceli & Boileau, LLP
William E. Hymes
Law Office of Donald P. Edwards
Ferderigos & Lambe Attorneys at Law
The Law Offices of Fuentes & Berrio, L.L.P.
Robert B. French, Jr., P.C.
The Law Offices of Peck and Peck
Cherry Law Firm, P.C.
Dexter & Kilcoyne
Philip R. Cockerille
Brotman Nusbaum Fox
Stephen J. Knox Attorney at Law
Littman & Babiarz
The Law Offices of Weinstein & Scharf, P.A.
Friedman & Friedman
The Law Firm of Robert S. Windholz
Fahrendorf, Viloria, Oliphant & Oster L.L.P.
Conway Law Firm, P.L.L.C.
Head Thomas Webb & Willis
Charles B. Roberts & Associates, P.C.
Pistotnik Law Offices
Nordloh Law Office, PLLC
The Law Offices of Rosenberg, Kirby, Cahill & Stankowitz
Kerner & Kerner
McAdory Borg Law Firm P.C.
For a funny one – check out this: The Law Offices of This is Arizona – a template, presumably available for purchase with ghost Attorneys John and Joan Smith.

(To be fair, not all of these firms are LawyerEdge clients – there is a smattering of different agencies. This does highlight the extent to which content gets cut and pasted around the web by website developers.)

How to Tell if You Have Duplicate Content Issues

The most obvious sign of duplicate content, of course is zero to low inbound search traffic to specific pages. You can diagnose this in Google Analtyics using the “Landing Pages” tab under content (make sure you filter for ONLY “organic search traffic”).

Another more accurate approach is to take a unique looking, sentence from your page and doing a search for it with quotations around the phrase:

If your search returns a ton of results . . . its time to start writing.