Links to law blogs and law firm Web sites are not created equal

It is well known that for your law blog or Web site to achieve higher ranking in the search engines, particularly Google, you need links from other blogs or Web sites pointing to your blog site. But it is not enough to just collect outside links from any old site.

Stephen Bucaro has a nice article in webpronews.com pointing out the the difference between getting a link from a gigantically long page referred to as a ‘link farm’ and links from sites that have more limited outgoing links that truly find your law blog or Web site as having valuable content.

Google’s search ranking formula looks at the pages giving the links to see how much credit your blog or Web site should be given for the incoming link. Bucaro explains:

When someone places a legitimate link to valuable content on their webpage, the webpage has low link density. Google’s page ranking formula gives the page a high score. If a link to your webpage is found on a high scoring webpage, that raises the rank of your webpage.

On the other hand, a page with a high link density, with hundreds of links and little other content, gets a negative score from Google. If a link to your webpage is found on a webpage with a negative score, that lowers the rank of your webpage.

In a very rare case, Bucaro warns: “If Google finds the same site listed in many link farms, they remove that site from their search engine.” Not to worry too much as it takes some unscrupulous work to get this far. Though I have seen some personal injury keywords become the subject of ‘link farms’ built by some shady search engine optimization companies.

Bucaro nails what I have known for a long time, and why law blogs work so well in drawing traffic via the search engines:

It’s hard work to get traffic to your website. There is only one method I know that works: put valuable, original content on your website. Other websites, blogs, and forums will post links to the valuable content on your website, not with a link swap, but as a resource to their audience.

Whne it comes to the search engines, content remains king. First, because search engines rank sites higher when they have relevant content (they can tell the difference between info about a law firm and info about the law). Second, because your law blog site will collect valuable links.