FindLaw Clients Crushed by Google Update
It wasn’t that long ago that FindLaw was a rising up-and-comer, an Internet marketing company that specialized in search engine optimization for legal websites. The firm’s online marketing team was hired by thousands of lawyers, attorneys and community offices to create a better online experience for users. These sites focused on law, so it might be surprising to learn that FindLaw was using Black Hat SEO tactics to churn out hundreds of websites that weren’t really worth anything once Google Panda 4.0 came along.
Panda 4.0 & FindLaw
The goal of Panda 4.0 wasn’t to crush FindLaw or penalize hundreds of innocent client websites. But that’s exactly what happened in May 2014 when Google released the latest update to its massive search engine algorithm. Why was FindLaw and so many of its client sites affected?
The way FindLaw allegedly operated was held in the dark for many of its clients until they began to drop out of existence on Google’s rankings. That’s when many of FindLaw’s clients found that they were being hustled, in a sense. FindLaw was allegedly creating legal-based websites and then shopping the sites to the highest bidder. But the clients didn’t know about these practices and thought that FindLaw was created original, customized content for their website. When Panda 4.0 was released, sites that offered thin, low-quality content dropped almost instantly in search engine result page rankings. Because FindLaw’s websites were pre-created, and not company-specific, it was easy for FindLaw to give the website to a new client when an old client stopped doing business through FindLaw. All of this duplicated, moving content is now penalized through Google’s ranking system. So you can imagine the fallout when hundreds of sites dropped in a day.
So many sites were hosted by FindLaw’s domain that it’s easy to look back through ranking logs and find exactly when Panda 4.0 went into effect. And it wasn’t just the sites hosted on FindLaw’s domain that plummeted. FindLaw provided content and blogs to many websites, and those sites were hurt, too, because of Panda’s unique way to rank a site. A law firm that had a solid website would rank well, but use too many FindLaw pages to build up that site, and soon the whole website’s ranking is lowered. Some sites that suffered were comprised of only 20% of FindLaw material, but that was enough for Panda to inflict its penalties.
Another practice that came to light was the buying and selling of links. Search engines rank websites on whether other sites link back to the original website. This is called backlinking, and it’s an important network built to show a site is credible and trustworthy. But buying and selling links is prohibited by Google’s Webmaster guidelines, so sites that are included in these phony networks are penalized, too.
FindLaw’s Black Hat SEO Tactics
Policing websites is a tough job, and Google has implemented hundreds of algorithm updates in order to promote websites that provide quality content within highly functioning websites while penalizing sites that just don’t cut it. Google has taken a morally high ground for website rankings: provide informative, thought-provoking content that serves readers or perish. Of course, there are ways to cheat the system, and Black Hat SEO tactics try to do just that.
With Black Hat tactics, gaining the highest rankings possible is the end goal. And some online marketing agencies will do anything to make their client No. 1. Google sees this as a problem because as it offers more low-quality sites to users, those users will leave and use other search engines. Google of course has it’s own “consumer” to please, so it tries to rank sites in terms of not just keyword matching and topics, but also usefulness.
Some companies have recovered from FindLaw’s run-in with Panda 4.0 by creating their own content, getting rid of FindLaw’s updates, and turning to inbound marketing companies that can provide results through White Hat SEO tactics. If you’re looking for higher rankings, consider this: it’s possible to get your site to the top 5 Google ranking positions, but is it worth it when there’s always another algorithm update being released? We’ll stick to the trusted methods Google recommends rather than try to dodge or trick the search engine for results.
