Every attorney on page 1 of Google in the last 20 years has done something to manipulate the algorithm. It’s worth it, people search for attorneys, and the attorneys ranking get cases.
Backlinks, in general, come in 3 flavors: good, bad, and ugly.
- Good links: A good link comes from a site which is geographically relevant, topically relevant, is placed on a domain that has not been spammed to hell and back, within a relevant article, with a natural appearing context. (Of course, Google’s guidelines say to not build links at all, and only obtain them naturally. Obeying Google is one way to get stuck on page 5.)
- Bad links: Not long ago, bad links would get your website penalized. These days, Google ususally just ignores them, although it is possible they demote your site in some cases. A “bad link” comes from:
– Irrelevant websites – examples: A mommy blog linking to a personal injury attorney, a lawncare site in the UK linking to a Denver attorney for no reason.
– Low quality sites – examples: Websites that do not rank, have lost traffic, or have a tremendous amount of other articles on them linking out to lawyers, locksmiths, or casinos.
– Sites which link to you for exact match anchor text such as “Denver car accident lawyer”. Google stopped rewarding this type of behavior in 2006.
– Crummy press releases
– Useless scholarships - Ugly links: These come from the lowest quality sites, such as overseas sites, blog comment spam, links from sites with NO traffic, hacked sites, “link insertions” into old articles, links from sites which have been penalized, reciprocal link schemes, etc.
List of Heavily Spammed Sites we see Lawyers Getting Daily:
Unfortunately, some attorneys have PAID to be on these junk sites. These are sites we see attorneys getting links from every single day. These links do not help with rankings.
- bestratedattorney.com
- lawexpertise.com
- lawanswer.com
- thefrisky.com
- AugustaFreePress.com
- WomenDailyMagazine.com
- side.cr
- techbullion.com
- legalwar.net
- lawexpertise.net
- lawbattlefield.com
- legalservice4you.com
- lawexpertzone.com
- nitkinlaw.com
- thelawyerworld.com
Useless Directory Links:
There are thousands of directory sites. Listing your law firm on any of these low quality directories to “build citations” is a waste of time. They will not drive any traffic, nor will they provide any SEO value. Some SEO agencies charge a monthly fee to build and maintain these directory listings. We recommend avoiding companies which offer this “service”. In general, anything other than AVVO, FindLaw, HG, Justia, Martindale, Nolo is probably a waste of time.
- lekkoo.com
- attorneyslisted.com
- personalinjurylawyersearch.org
- lawdeeda.com
- a-lawyer-directory.com
- injury-attorney-lawyer.com
- findattorneys.org
- targetlaw.com
- spotalawyer.com
- lawyerspages.com
- getlawyersonline.com
- pathlegal.com
- directoryusalawyers.com
- lexvidhi.com
- dilawctory.com
- zipleaf.us
- bdpages.com
- yellowusa.com
- tplocal.us
Got Links?
If your SEO agency is blasting your website with low quality links and you’re not ranking, fire them. You don’t have to hire us, but fire them. If you want good links and to rank, contact us.
