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Lawyers spamming blogs for SEO

December 15, 2008

I‘m getting sick of lawyers leaving comments here under the name ‘DC Divorce Lawyer’ or ‘Injury Lawyer.’ Is that what your kids call you? Is that how you get introduced when speaking to a group? You mean you use your real name. Amazing.

Why not have the decency to use your name when participating in conversations on my blog and other blogs around the net? Blogs really are conversations.

Even if you don’t care whether you look like an idiot, lawyers publishing blogs aren’t blogging for the benefit of sleazy lawyers looking for a free way to get SEO for their blog or website. It may sound unbelievable, but lawyers are blogging to provide value to a growing Internet discussion, not for SEO to get traffic to a website.

I’m not the only one calling out lawyers on this junk. Widely read Scott Greenfield has said he’ll delete the comments and ban you. Scott also rightfully points out that you look like a ‘blithering idiot’ in spamming blogs, especially when paying SEO snake oil sales people to do it for you.

Worse than having your comments deleted is having them marked junk by the blog publisher. Junk filters work behind the scenes across tens of thousands of blogs at once. When I mark something as junk it alerts the junk filtering system that everyone else is using to mark as junk all blog comments coming from your ISP. Junk comments, like junk email, are never displayed, they are filtered out.

Why do lawyers do this crap? For SEO. They are being told they need links to their website or blog with the anchor text (words in link) describing what they do. They are further being told that blogs are nothing more than a way to get SEO.

Problem is that SEO spam is as offensive as spam email. Worse than spam email, SEO spam is on display for all. Shows the world how tasteless lawyers can be. Lawyers are among the worst, if not the worst, SEO spam artists on the net.

I have championed the Internet and blogs as the great equalizer for good lawyers in their marketing battle against the lawyers with all the money. I’d like to see good lawyers who give of their time by offering information and insight get the good work.

Greenfield has contended that lawyers will ruin a good thing like blogs. Though I remain an optimist, it’s sad to see lawyers who do not give a darn about their reputation or the reputation of our legal profession spam away like this.

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