Is Your Law Firm SEO Firm Ethical And Following Google’s Guidelines?
Law firms are obtaining significant amounts of business from the Internet. However, Web business can come to a screeching halt if your SEO firm is not following Google’s quality guidelines.
Google has taken significant steps to prevent “juicing the rankings.” Three major corporations that have reportedly been “busted” are Overstock.com, J.C. Penny and Forbes.
In another development, Google recently updated its algorithm to penalize low-quality sites (currently U.S. sites), particularly those that copy content from other sites or are simply not useful.
Google stated in the “Official Google Blog” on February 24, 2010 that their quality goal, “was simple: to give people the most relevant answers to their queries as quickly as possible. This requires constant tuning of our algorithms, as new content—both good and bad—comes online all the time.” Google further stated, “Many of the changes we make are so subtle that very few people notice them. But in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries—and we wanted to let people know what’s going on. 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. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.”
They further stated, “We can’t make a major improvement without affecting rankings for many sites. It has to be that some sites will go up and some will go down. Google depends on the high-quality content created by wonderful websites around the world, and we do have a responsibility to encourage a healthy web ecosystem. Therefore, it is important for high-quality sites to be rewarded, and that’s exactly what this change does.”
If you would like further information on insuring that your law firm website is following Google guidelines, please contact us at marketing@consultwebs.com or 800-872-6590.
Dale Tincher says:
February 28, 2011 at 2:50pmNumerous sites have been dramatically affected by Google’s changes. See a list at http://searchengineland.com/who-lost-in-googles-farmer-algorithm-change-66173
Dale Tincher says:
February 27, 2011 at 3:27pmExaminer.com reports (http://www.examiner.com/technology-in-national/google-s-tweaks-begin-affecting-content-farms) that:
Two of the prime examples given when “content farms” are referred to are Associated Content and Demand Media. Demand Media operates a number of sites, like eHow and Trails.com.
Among a list of sites that have taken hits in their Google rankings compiled by SISTRIX, Associated Content was hit hard, as was Demand Media’s Answerbag and Trails.com. The top ten losers were:
wisegeek.com
ezinearticles.com
suite101.com
hubpages.com
buzzle.com
associatedcontent.com
freedownloadscenter.com
essortment.com
fixya.com
americantowns.com
SearchEngineLand has started to collect data from different measurements of affected sites. It’s clear, however, that the top affected sites are pretty consistent across the measurements.