Lawyer Link Schemes and How To Avoid Getting Scammed

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In the competitive world of legal services, search engine optimization (SEO) plays a vital role in attracting potential clients. Link schemes are unethical strategies that can harm your firm’s online reputation and search engine rankings. Many attorneys are unaware of how these tactics may negatively affect their digital presence.

Understanding the risks involved with link schemes is crucial for maintaining an ethical and effective SEO strategy. Engaging in such practices can lead to penalties and reduced visibility on search engines, which ultimately impacts client acquisition. For a comprehensive and ethical approach, seeking professional SEO services for attorneys and law firms can make a substantial difference.

By focusing on reputable link-building, law firms can improve their search engine rankings without jeopardizing their integrity. Proper SEO practices ensure that your firm stands out for the right reasons, helping clients find you through legitimate means. The benefits of a robust and ethical SEO strategy are clear: increased visibility, higher credibility, and sustainable growth.

Ethical Implications of Link Schemes in the Legal Field

Link schemes can lead to serious ethical concerns for law firms. Lawyers are expected to uphold high ethical standards in all aspects, including digital marketing. Engaging in link schemes can tarnish a firm’s reputation and credibility.

Ethical Standards: The American Bar Association (ABA) sets ethical guidelines for legal advertising. Violations of these standards through dubious link-building practices can result in disciplinary action.

Firms may face penalties from search engines for using unethical SEO tactics. These penalties can drastically affect a law firm’s online visibility and client outreach.

However, there are no known cases of lawyers/attorneys getting in trouble for their SEO outside of the more egregious instances, such as copying/stealing copyrighted content. Judges are not privy to the practice of building links to a high enough level to be able to identify link schemes other than the most obvious unethical examples.

Leaving us in a true grey area, where as long as we are not breaking laws, there is not much anyone can do about abusing page rank for better search engine rankings.

Client Trust: Clients trust lawyers to act ethically and transparently. Link schemes or aggressive link building is not something a client would ever notice. Unless they are an SEO marketer themselves.

Types of Link Schemes:

• Buying or selling links that pass PageRank
• Excessive link exchanges (“Link to me, and I’ll link to you”)
• Using automated programs to create links to your site

By these standards, no link building would be possible at all. Meaning that Google simply wants to discourage you from trying to build links in an unnatural way.

What is Natural Link Building?

• Using quality content for article submissions, and avoiding niche edits where you have no control of what content your link is stuffed into.
• Building links only from websites that get their own healthy amount of traffic.
• Diversifying what kind of websites you are using for links, and not relying on networks of websites owned by the same person/brand.
• Definitely nothing on Fiver or any other “gig” type site where you can pay for links.
• No automated tools like “GA” links or other “stack” properties where people use free sites or profiles to spam tons of value-less links towards your site.

Using a controlled process towards link building is essential. As there is no vendor that you can outsource to, which will put in this level of effort to repeatedly provide quality links. You must QA this process every time, as it is easy for quality to slip, and it is easy to get scammed by link builders.

Long Term Link Building

Maintaining rankings after building links completely depends on both the quality of the website used, as well as the topic chosen for the article submission.

If you are submitting an article for a link, and you write a story about recent news, that article will only be relevant for a short amount of time.

Since gaining traffic to the submitted article adds pagerank to the acquired link, you would lose a lot of the “link juice” that you gained from said link.

Law firms should obtain links using a combination of strategies to have a diverse set of mentions online. From articles that are very relevant now, but also always relevant, thus providing links that are always getting a boost from the traffic their submitted article generated.

Here are a few suggestions to avoid slipping in quality over time:

• Always vet link exchange partners. Most are looking to trick you.
• Regularly check backlink profiles. Links can drop for many reasons.
• Follow up with vendors if you notice that something about the article is different than what was approved and paid for.

By paying attention to quality of link building across these points, you can avoid losing the rankings that you gained from first landing your links placements.

Black Hat Link Schemes in Legal Practice

Black Hat SEO techniques, such as shady link exchanges, are employed to manipulate search engine rankings. These methods might provide a temporary boost but are risky and often lead to penalties or lost rankings over the long term.

Common examples include:

• Another law firm requests for a blog exchange because they noticed that your website is getting good traffic.
  • However, the law firm is owned by a lawyer that is also selling SEO to other lawyers as an agency.
  • You may end up with a link as promised, only to later realized that they removed the link, or set it to no-follow. Capitalizing on your inability to be checking for lost links, and scamming you out of the supposed mutual exchange for links.
• Bogus Directory Site Startups that reach out to sell you a participation award because they “carefully selected” you as well as every attorney on their contact list for your city.
• Abusing an exploit to hack your website. But not making it obvious for you to know there was a breach.
  • The bad actor can then insert links from your website towards their clients, in a hidden way to avoid detection.
• False traffic through automation/bots/foreign sweatshops.
  • This one has existed for a long time, but continues to be used by novice SEO marketers to avoid having to spend money on SEO fulfillment to show rank movements.

Impacts on Law Firms:

Law firm websites may initially see an increase in rankings due to these tactics. However, search engines continuously refine algorithms to detect and penalize such practices. Consequently, not having a long term approach can leave you with lost rankings, and wasted money.

Why Avoid Black Hat Techniques:

• Ethical concerns: Black hat techniques are considered unethical depending on what method is used.
• Risk of penalties: Search engines may penalize and drop a site’s ranking.
• Long-term visibility: Sustainable SEO practices yield more stable results.

Most SEO marketers that use black hat strategies are not knowledgeable enough to have a real fulfillment-based SEO agency. So they resort to schemes that allow them to trick law firms into paying for lackluster results. They often have high churn rates, and never maintain clients for longer than a year.

Searching for an experienced SEO marketer that specializes in legal campaigns is essential before investing money into a campaign that is either not good enough, or very misleading in what work is actually being done.