Yesterday Conrad Saam wrote a great article detailing a new rental website product by FindLaw – It basically involves FindLaw RENTING extremely low quality sites that are optimized via FindLaw’s network of sites. Craig Brooksby, of RedFalconweb provides even more detail on his BLOG post “Just Asking: Is this Natural Linking” These two articles both show how extremely low quality sites like http://clevelandcaraccidentlawyer.org/ are ranking in competitive SERPs with just a few well placed FindLaw links.
Forgetting that this link network is pure topology and therefore against Google guidelines, my question is how FindLaw could possibly rationalize doing this, when they have thousands of clients that are paying FindLaw to optimize their own law firm website. By offering pre-optimized “rental sites”, they are creating competition for all of their other clients. Maybe this is why FindLaw doesn’t have their name on any of these sites.
“Sorry Mr. Attorney – we cant get your expensive, great looking, 100 page website to rank for competitive terms, but if you pay us an additional X amount a month we can get a mass produced template site to rank right away”
In October I wrote about how many of FindLaw’s largest SEO clients were hurt by Penguin. Perhaps this is a desperate attempt to get some of their big spenders back on the first page?
Here is a screenshot of what the new sites look like. There are thousands of these.
