SpamBrain – Google’s December 2022 Link Update – Personal Injury Marketing Minute #39

Welcome to the Personal Injury Marketing Minute where we quickly cover the hot topics in the legal marketing world. I’m your host, Lindsey Busfield.

As I mentioned in an earlier podcast – All About Backlinks for Law Firms – law firms who show up on the first page of Google have typically all purchased links. As I also mentioned, it is officially against Google’s guidelines to purchase backlinks, but lawyers do it anyway and it has helped substantially…until now.

On December 14^th 2022, Google rolled out their December 2022 Link Spam update. This is Google’s biggest fight yet against inorganic link building. They are using an AI-based spam prevention system called SpamBrain to identify sites that sell inorganic links and discredit the link’s power. While it will not actively penalize sites that buy and sell links, it will nullify the credit from any unnatural links.

It will take about two weeks to fully roll out, but I anticipate that you will begin to see the results of this launch within the next month.