In today’s computer-driven society, having a great search ranking is important for the overall scope and effectiveness of your law firm. Achieving a favorable search ranking can take some work; however, it is important to make sure you don’t destroy all of your hard work in one fell swoop.
While many practices can damage your search rankings, here are four of the more common ones to avoid:
1. Linking to Sites with Poor Authority
Link-building done right is a tried and true SEO practice for building website rankings. For this reason, you should avoid linking to websites that are poor quality, of ill repute, or sites that do not put much stock into SEO. Doing so can negatively affect your own website.
Linking to a low domain site as a source is not the real issue. Why the website ranks low is the real problem. One example is a new website. While new websites may be set up well and high quality, they will likely be “too green” to provide you with much of a boost by linking to them. You’ll only be helping them out!
2. Malware
Take care not to send your readers to websites that will infect their computers with malware, as this could hurt the trustworthiness of your firm’s website. Google probably won’t ding you for this (you often can’t help if sites you’ve linked to end up being compromised); however, this kind of link building (over time) can show you’re careless. This, Google has an issue with and will penalize you.
Before linking to a website, you should check out the domain. You can do this by using a free scanner or using Google’s tool.
3. Spam
Spam can hurt your law firm’s reputation as well. Two types of spam can work together to bring your ranking down. First is comment spam, which can occur when your site has duplicated comments, comments that make little sense or comments that have no substance. This is often caused by using an automated software to post. Second is forum spam, which generally occurs when links are crammed into forum posts. Forum posts can either be software generated or manually entered.
4. Too Many Links Too Quickly
Having links is good, but magically having thousands of links overnight can put up red flags. Google’s algorithm is smart – it can notice when there is unusual growth in the number of links a particular website has and will ding your site for manipulating the links. Unfortunately, there’s no hard-fast “rule” of how many new links in a given time is too many.
For more advice on how to manage your law firm’s SEO website rankings, browse our blog and list of resources. To learn more about our marketing services, contact the expert internet marketers at SEOLegal today.
