If you received a manual action or unnatural links penalty on your website, it is not forever. The penalties, which may range from months to years, do have an intrinsic end date and are related, according to Distinguished Google Engineer Matt Cutts, to the “severity of the problem that Google sees.” There are no notifications sent when a penalty expires and if one has expired, the manual spam actions viewer...
Feb 25
Google Places Now Allowing Single Word Business Descriptor
The latest change to Google Places was announced last week, and the update is sparking some consternation. Could this latest update to Google’s quality guidelines open the door to spam?
The update was made to clarify how attorneys and other business owners may name their businesses within Google Places. Before this change, Google strictly enforced a “legal business name only” policy. Now, the service will allow the legal business name...
Read MoreSep 25
How Fake Reviews Can Get Your Firm Sued
Generally, the consequence for taking a shortcut with your search engine marketing is some sort of disciplinary action from Google. But a law firm in San Diego is getting more than an SEO problem; the online review and business directory, Yelp, is suing the firm, claiming their employees posted fake reviews to the company's Yelp profile.
The firm owner, Julian McMillan, believes there is no merit to the case and that...
Read MoreAug 12
Want to rank high in Bing Local? Try SPAM
We recently looked at the local results for Google, Yahoo!, and Bing in an attempt to find similarities among the results displayed in the search engines' local results.
While Yahoo! and Bing are both powered by the same search engine, the logic behind their local results are very different.
In Yahoo!, a search for a Chicago personal injury lawyer yielded one spammy listing out of five. In Bing for that same search, we found four spammy entries out of five....
Read MoreJul 22
Your law firm’s outbound links still play an important role
There is a lot of discussion within the search engine marketing community surrounding the Google Penguin 2.0 updates and how they affect inbound links to your firm's website. In last month's issue of the Bigger Law Firm magazine, the author created a framework for how to think about search engine marketing moving forward. It's about connections, not just links to your website.
Connections involve social connections, citations, websites which mention...
Read MoreJul 19
How to Write Content that Captures Your Readers’ Attention, Part 1 – Headlines
This is part 1 in a series of posts about how to write content that people actually want to read.
Some tried and true marketing tactics are no longer effective, especially when speaking to online viewers. People have been hit with so much hyperbole, so many empty, information-free articles, and so many offers that seem – and are – too good to be true that they have simply begun ignoring...
Read MoreMar 8
Google’s How Search Works site outlines the search process and offers live spam screenshots
Google has launched a website called How Search Works, which takes users through the process of search from crawling and indexing to displaying results. From a purely design standpoint, the site is a beautiful example of how modern coding techniques can create a completely interactive, animated and Flash-free website. It uses plenty of white space, large text and simple graphics to explain the indexing and search process....
Oct 10
Google’s Newest Target is Your Law Firm’s Domain Name
Recently, Google announced another algorithm change in their efforts to stop web spam. The newest change has nothing to do with your links and little to do with content. This time, Google is targeting your law firm's domain name.
The goal with the newest change is to target low-quality “exact match” domain names. For most law firms, this change may actually help their rankings.
Over the past decade, spammers in all industries (not just law) have been picking up domain...
Read MoreSep 28
Harmonize your content and visual marketing for maximum reach
Content Marketing: Hail to the King
The key to a truly successful law firm marketing strategy has always been producing a steady stream of relevant content. Even before Google released Panda and now Penguin, the most reliable way to promote long-term goals – both of being found and converting visitors to clients – was to create value through quality, meaningful content. Now, with Google supposedly cracking down on...
Sep 5
Best Practices for Getting the Most out of Your Twitter Posts
Twitter. It can be hard for attorneys to take seriously. The nature of the popular micro-blogging network with its frequent, short posts seems to bring out the worst and the most childish in people. It is the home of celebrity Twitter Wars, in which those with way too much time and ego trade insults in a public forum. It is also the home of a stream of pointless posts...