It’s no secret. Nearly every personal injury law firm on the front page on Google in every city in the United States of America builds links which violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. With that fact established, let’s discuss PBNs.
What is a Private Blog Network (PBN)?
A PBN is basically a group of websites which exist to link to a target website and manipulate the site’s ranking in Google’s search results.
That sounds wonderful, but…
There are some really great PBNs out there, and trust me, you don’t have access to them. People build PBNs to make money, and they do that by abusing them as often as possible. I have examined the backlinks of thousands of attorney’s websites, and each and every time we run into a PBN, it sucks.
Most PBNs that shady marketing agencies utilize consist of 50 – 100 crummy websites which link out to each and every single one of their clients. In fact, one agency out there uses their PBN on ALL of their clients.
If they had taken the time to build out a real, legitimate website, and then linked out to a client from a fresh, topic relevant article, I’d give them a pass. However, most PBNs are slapped together very lazily.
Should Personal Injury Law Firms use PBNs?
Personal Injury Attorneys should never use a Private Blog Network (PBN) if they plan on their website serving them well and helping them grow their practice.
There are two big reasons why:
- Google has gotten very good at spotting the footprints left behind by these PBNs. When they discover the PBN one of two things are going to happen. They’re either going to totally ignore the outbound links which are coming from the PBN, or, they’re going to penalize the site receiving the links. So at best, you get nothing, at worst, your site gets trashed and you have to hire us to disavow all of your crummy links.
- People that run PBNs are generally very lazy. They’re going to link directly to your important pages with exact match keywords which nobody would ever use in the real world, such as “Denver Car Accident Lawyer”. The vast majority of people running PBNs practice SEO like it’s 2005.
Linkbuilding is difficult.
Link building is tough, and as someone who has been building links for websites since the 1990’s, I can promise you that it’s only getting tougher. That said, we’ve been building links here for decades, and more specifically for personal injury law firms for over 10 years. Simply put, we don’t know anyone else with access to the sites and relationships with the publications that we’ve established here. If we ever found someone with that skillset, we’d hire them on the spot. That’s why personal injury firms hire us to build their links.
If you want to rank on page 1 of Google and get more cases, please feel free to read more our personal injury lawyer SEO services or contact us today and we’ll see if we’re a match.
