Header graphic for print
Real Lawyers Have Blogs On the topic of the law, firm marketing, social media, & baseball

Law firms using shady blog tactics in attempt to get search engine results

Law firms themselves or people they hire to do search engine optimization – SEO – are stooping to some low tactics in hope to improve their rankings in search engine results. They're using splogs – short for spam and blogs.

What the heck is a splog? Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Maverick NBA team and backer of Ice Rocket, a blog search engine/aggregator provides a nice definition. “A splog is any blog whose creator doesnt add any written value.” Cuban thinks that Ice Rocket has already eliminated over 1 million of these blogs.

Lawyers are falling in with the same slime who run splogs on hair loss, cialis, and discount tickets. Just do a search on a blog search engine like technorati for terms like these and see what I mean. Now do a search on tecnorati for medical malpractice lawyer and you'll see blog posts like this, this and this.

Even when lawyers' names are not mentioned in these junk posts, there are links using terms like 'Houston medical malpractice' in an effort to improve Google's page rank to some Web page which ultimately will link to a law firm. Whether they know it or not, law firms are paying unscrupulous SEO firms to do this type of (excuse my language) crap for them. Fortunately someone like Cuban is going to start fighting back by eliminating these blogs.

Lawyers running decent blogs on Blogger may be hurt by Cuban's, and I am sure others to follow, efforts to purge these blogs. Blogger blogs are the greatest offenders so in some cases Blogger blogs may get excluded by blog search engines according to Cuban.

  • http://www.strategichrlawyer.com Diane Pfadenhauer

    Kevin, while it may be true that unscrupulous lawyers are trying to get in the game, I'd like ot think the public is smart enough to notice that these sites are nothing more than ads. Like you've previously said, blogs provide valuable information and create trust – these obvioulsy do not, and anyone can see right through them.

  • http://kevin@lexblog.com Kevin O'Keefe

    Thanks for the comment Diane.
    The problem is that the public never sees these splog sites. The sites are put up just to generate links, links that will in turn cause sites they link to to do better in the search engines. So it's these sites that are not full of the junk content that the public does see when they do a search.