Yesterday I talked about how FindLaw was leveraging their network to boost up low quality rental sites they were selling to attorneys. My last line was that you better act fast because these “Target sites” would soon be gone…..
Well google just unveiled Panda 4.0 and it took FindLaw’s entire low quality network with it. Hundreds of FindLaw sites have vanished from the SERP. The site I used to illustrate the network, www.clevelandcaraccidentlawyer.org was ranked #1 in Google for “Cleveland Car Accident Lawyer” just yesterday. Today it has vanished from the results.
Panda 4.0 was designed to prevent sites with poor quality content from working its way into Google’s top search results. The good news is that it looks like it is working as advertised.
Hopefully FindLaw will learn its lesson here. That, you cannot scale search engine optimization. Getting a site to rank in Google is a function of building an exceptional website that people will want to link too. Creating share-worthy content and doing the public outreach necessary to ensure people see that content is very hard. It requires creativity, lots of man hours, and a deep commitment to your clients. When you have to do that for 10,000+ legal websites, Like FindLaw does, it becomes a nearly impossible task.
If only FindLaw had heeded the advice of their own Mark Jacobsen. Mark is the Senior Director, Strategic Development and Thought Leadership at FindLaw. In December, Mark Jacobsen wrote a BLOG series titled Understanding Law Firm Website traffic which stressed the need for building quality, content rich websites versus going after vanity keyword phrases like “Cleveland Car Accident Lawyer”. While I would argue you can accomplish both with proper SEO, for FindLaw who has a built in conflict of interest, (they will work with an unlimited number of attorneys in the same practice area/metro) the Jacobsen approach makes the most sense. A content rich FindLaw with good onsite SEO will get a lot of long tail exposure along with qualified directory traffic from Findlaw.com. That simple model has made a lot of attorneys successful. They need to go back to that.