One of the effects of having a FindLaw website, is that over time you will soon be inundated with emails from attorneys asking you to link to them. In return, they will place a link on their site linking back to you. While this may sound reasonable, the potential damage it could do to your website far outweighs any benefit.

Avoid “Bad Neighbors”
It is a well known fact that relevant inbound links are an important component to search engine optimization. The web is woven with links, both natural and unnatural. A quick check of your url in http://www.linkpopularity.com/ will tell you how many inbound links you have. Of course you have no control over who links to you, however, you do have control on who you link too. Websites that are found to incorporate unethical SEO practices (keyword stuffing, spam domains, duplicate content, hidden text etc..) are considered “bad neighbors”. By linking to these bad neighbors, the search engine may assume you are part of the same bad neighborhood and thus will penalize your site. Penalize can mean banishment from the Google search results, so outbound linking is not a decision you should take lightly.

The problem with these email solicitations, is that you have no idea what kind of neighborhood you are signing up for. There are ways to check and see if the site is in a bad neighborhood. I recommended http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/ as one of the reliable tools that reports links to and from suspicious sites and sites that are missing in Google’s index. However, even if the site passes this test, I still would not recommend linking with solicitors. There is simply no way of guaranteeing that the site will continue to avoid bad neighborhoods, particularly since they are aggressively soliciting strangers to link with.

If you are interested in linking with other attorneys, I am only comfortable linking with other attorneys that you can vouch for or FindLaw clients that I can personally vouch for- and then only on a limited basis.