Anchor Text Used To Help, Now It Can Hurt

Everyday, I work with law firm clients who have been hit by algorithm shifts such as Penguin and Panda. In many recent cases, excessive use of keyword rich anchor text has been a big part of the reason why firms have seen a drop in rankings. Perhaps a site has 80% or more of its inbound links built within “money phrases” that  it’s trying to rank for. Whereas, just last year, Google regularly rewarded this type of link profile, Mountain View now crawls the unnatural link profile and downgrades the site.

Google has become more efficient at crawling the web and no longer needs anchor text to determine context

In the past, Google relied on anchor text as a contextual signal to determine what niche a link addressed. For example, if I read a great NY Times story on travel in India, I may decide to link back to the article within the keywords “travel in India.” This link would send a signal to Google that the Times story was about travel in India and ultimately would help the article rank for Indian travel searches. However, Google’s reliance on anchor text to discern context has diminished as its data aggregation abilities have strengthened. In the local sphere, Google uses citation signals to identify and rank local businesses. Similarly, they parse through the text of our Gmail messages and tailor ads accordingly. Mere text on a page gives reliable insight into location and relevance, making user generated signals like anchor text increasingly obsolete.

Anchor Text Was Too Easily Manipulated

From Google’s perspective, the problem with anchor text was that it was too easily manipulated. Not only would SEO campaigns purchase links on questionable sites to sculpt page rank, links typically contained anchor text that matched exactly one of the important terms the campaign was targeting. Anchor text reliance caused Google to reward manipulative tactics to the detriment of its users. After all, why should a page rank just because an SEO team has built 100 links, all of which just happen to say “NYC clothing.” Part of the purpose behind Penguin was to stop rewarding manipulative anchor text in favor of more organic signals such as social. This article on Search Engine Watch cites data  that claims sites with 65% or more of their inbound links coming from “money” keywords were particularly vulnerable to Penguin.

Google’s preference has always been in favor of “natural” and editorially given” links. They believe those links usually come within partial match, branded or random anchor text, but rarely exact match. They partially re-structured the SERPs accordingly (I say partially because manipulative link profiles continue to dominate the legal SERPs).

The Death of Anchor Text: What Now?

Most site owners who were hit by Penguin scramble to clean up their link profiles or start over with a new site, however, thought should also be given to how Google will replace anchor text as a contextual signal. After all, Google still needs a methodology for evaluating topical relevance, where will this come from?

According to industry thought leaders like Rand Fishkin, a phenomenon known as co-citation is on the rise, and could eventually replace anchor text as a ranking factor.

What is co-citation? Co-citation is a contextual mention of a company (or lawyer) and their corresponding niche within a piece of industry relevant content. It need not involve a link. For example, let’s say the popular legal blog Above the Law does a story on Greenberg Traurig and refers to them as a “Miami based law firm.” Google will crawl the Above the Law story, parse the data that applies to Greenberg Truarig and, essentially, store it in the Greenberg Truarig “file.” To hear Rand tell it, enough of these mentions can lead to Greenberg Traurig ranking for Miami law firm searches, even if the page that ranks does not have “Miami” or “law firm” anywhere in the page title.

Co-Citation Makes Sense

There is some disagreement in the SEO world about the importance of co-citation, but I believe the buzz surrounding the topic makes sense. As I’ve stated above, the concept of co-citation is consistent with the local search landscape where a business citation profile has a huge impact on its local ranking. Google crawls the web looking for data related to business name, address and phone number and aggregates what it finds. When conflicting signals are present, the business listing doesn’t achieve the highest levels of trust and is demoted. Conversely, where reviews and consistent location data are present, a business will appear more prominently in search results. While not divorced entirely from domain authority, the local search eco-system derives many of its signals from non link based sources. In this way, co-citation is a logical extension of Google’s existing local algorithm. In addition to crawling the web looking for and aggregating information about a business location, Google has begun to compile brand associations and mentions as well.

Looks like SEO and PR may be headed for a merger.

Marketing A Law Firm? Be Careful Who You Hire

A few weeks back, one of my attorney friends told me about a “smart” outsourcing decision he made for his firm. Before I get into exactly what that decision was, the reader should know that this particular attorney is a very savvy marketer and a student of search. He also happens to be a sought after lawyer with lots and lots of work (i.e. more likely to be reading case law than SEO Moz), which is why he was making the following mistake on a monthly recurring basis: he was paying “some guy in Miami” to “build links for him.”

The Stakes Are High, Mistakes Hurt

I think it’s fair to say that, when I heard this, I freaked out. I raised the tone of my voice and began speaking with machine gun speed. Don’t do that! I know how much time and effort my friend puts into marketing his law practice. The last thing I wanted to see was his web presence lying bloodied and decapitated off to the side of the Google road, which is exactly what you’re risking if you’re “paying some guy in Miami” to build links for you.

Google’s Penguin Update

Perhaps it’s because everyone’s too busy actually practicing law, but word of Google’s Penguin update has yet to make its way through the legal community. Even many marketing savvy firms are still in the dark. For those of you who missed it, Google rolled out an algorithm update on April 24th of this year aimed at filtering “over optimized” sites out of the search results. I’m not exactly sure why, but the update was named Penguin.  Among other black hat tactics, such as keyword stuffing and link schemes, Penguin punishes manipulative linking tactics. For example, if you hire some guy in Miami to build 50 links, with exact match anchor text,  back to the homepage of your law firm website, on sites with URLs like www.buywebdirectory-links.info, you’re begging for this message to appear in your Webmaster tools inbox:

Dear site owner or webmaster of www.yoursiteaddress.com,We’ve detected that some of your site’s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes. We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines.

Translation: We think your site is spam, please remove all of the manipulative crap you tried to use to game the system or your site will never appear in search results ever, ever again. Ouch.

A few weeks back, I wrote about a colleague who received this dreaded message right before losing virtually all traffic to a site he relied on as an important part of his firm’s marketing efforts. He too, had paid “some guy” to “build links for him.” A review of the links that were built showed low quality sites and exact match anchor text. A Penguin penalty ensued.

Don’t Panic

While every established site will have some links in its portfolio that the webmaster is probably not proud of, and some link activity is beyond the control of site owners entirely, the practice of building large numbers of spam links with the goal of “shaping page rank,” is dead.  Engaging in these tactics can hurt your business and permanently harm your website. If you would like to discuss ways in which your firm can engage in a link building campaign that complies with Google’s webmaster guidelines, give me a call or send me an e-mail, I am happy to help when I can.

Was Your Site a Victim of Google’s Penguin Update?

Over the last year and a half, the search landscape has changed dramatically. SEO tactics that worked in the past no longer fly. Spam link building combined with excessive use of keyword rich anchor text, prevalent with some SEO firms even to this day, can now cause site owners incur “Penguin” penalties.

Designed to punish manipulative SEO and web spam, Google’s Penguin update was first unleashed on April 24th, 2012 and it caused quite a splash. The search engine results pages (“SERPs”) underwent transition across numerous industries, including legal. Sites that used to consistently rank on the first page disappeared from the top 50 and from the web altogether.

Why and how did this happen?

In order to understand why Google took the actions it did with Penguin, it is important to briefly touch on Google’s PageRank algorithm and how it shapes search results.

Manipulating Google PageRank

Google utilizes a patented PageRank system at the core of its search algorithm. PageRank is a link analysis tool that Google uses to evaluate the authority of a website. Sites with large numbers of high quality links are viewed as more credible than sites with fewer links. In this way, the web works as a democracy, with the highest ranking sites receiving the most votes from sites that choose to link to them. The anchor text a link is built within determines what election the vote counts for. For example, a link built to West Village Yoga within the text “yoga NYC” is a vote in the NYC yoga election.

The more authoritative the linking site, the more PageRank flows to the recipient of the link. In a perfect world, PageRank passes only when a link is given editorially based on useful or otherwise valuable information. That is how the system is supposed to work. However, many black and grey hat SEO firms used link building as a way to artificially sculpt PageRank by adding client sites to spam directories and blog networks. For good measure, they made sure to incorporate the same anchor text their clients were trying to rank for, over and over again, and guess what?

It worked.

I know friends who swore by their SEO firms and their link building practices, that is until Penguin. Now their sites have been crippled for all searches expect branded and maybe a handful of local queries.

Penguin Punishes Manipulative SEO

Through the Penguin update and subsequent refreshes, Google aims to remove from the SERPs sites that were attempting to manipulate PageRank. Paid links, spam links, keyword stuffing and blogging networks were all hit hard. When a new Penguin update is released, sites that have taken the appropriate steps to steps to remove bad links may regain rankings, while other sites will be caught and demoted for the first time.

Identifying Penguin

Was your law firm’s website affected by Penguin? Take a look at your analytics as well as your webmaster tools inbox. Although they do not do so uniformly, in some cases Google will send messages to site owners through webmaster tools warning of a manipulative link profile.

On the analytics front, did you notice a significant drop in traffic on April 24th? (that’s the day Penguin rolled out) Have you recently lost a prominent position for an important search terms?

If the answer is yes, your firm may have been hit by Penguin. You’re not alone. An attorney friend of mine is one of the biggest bankruptcy filers in his state. He emailed me in a panic one night after belatedly receiving an ominous message in his Webmaster tools inbox. Big brother didn’t like some of the tactics he’d been using and had stripped him of most of his rankings. He had no idea why. His business suffered.

We did some digging and were able to identify the problem fairly quickly. Spam. Loads and loads of spam. Unbeknownst to my friend, an SEO company he’d hired was building links to his law firm website on sites so crappy that I’m afraid to link to them here. He was getting hundreds of links with exact match anchor text (i.e. My city bankruptcy lawyer) from sites with domains like www.add-2SEOlinks.com. Google saw the links, saw the anchor text and he was a goner.

If your law firm website has recently seen a large drop in rankings, or if you’ve disappeared from Google altogether, you may have been hit by Penguin. Unfortunately, most firms are simply unaware of the tactics their SEO consultants are using. Especially as the web evolves, this lack of knowledge can prove to be very costly.

Lessons: Understand What Your SEO Firm Does; Don’t Fly In The Dark On Analytics

Especially because the legal industry is not inherently tech savvy, it is important for law firms in particular to have a good understanding of what they are getting for their marketing dollars. Most of the Penguin cases I’ve seen come as a direct result of firms hiring a company to “build links” to their website, without knowledge of where those links appear or how they may reflect on the firm.

In addition to carefully selecting vendors, it is crucial that firms investing in SEO are able to read their analytics reports. Without an understanding of how visitors find your website, it will be nearly impossible to monitor a company that claims to be fixing your site. It’s easy to be in denial about Penguin and believe that your web provider is “fixing the problem.” However, many Penguin issues are extremely difficult, if not impossible to resolve. Offending practices must be corrected or the site will continue taking hits with each new refresh to the algorithm. In my experience, giant companies like Findlaw (the company used by my bankruptcy friend) are simply too slow and bureaucratic to solve a linking penalty. I’ve seen Findlaw sites that have been demolished by Penguin still sporting obvious red flags well after their owners reported an ostensible “recovery strategy.”

In many cases, Penguin is so severe that firms are better served starting a new site from scratch using SEO tactics that comply with Google webmaster guidelines, but this decision cannot be made without a sober look at the analytics. If you have been hit, or believe you’re recovering, the only way to know for sure is to understand the data.

Why Publish a Legal Blog?

When I first started my law firm in 2008, blogging wasn’t as prevalent as it is now. This isn’t to say it wasn’t being done, but fewer firms were on board, and those who were weren’t necessarily doing it for the “right reasons.” I must admit, when I began publishing, it was because I’d been told I “had to.” My primary focus was sending the right freshness signals to the search engines, not connecting with clients (I’ve since realized the error of my ways and have become full fledged quality content evangelist).

Google Is Hungry For Content, But Not Just Any Content Will Do

It’s no secret that Google has always been hungry for content. It’s just that, in the olden days, Googlebot was in more of a Tony Soprano phase, they’d eat anything. As a result, the idea was to regularly publish content (any content) to create positive freshness signals. Google would then crawl your site more actively and reward frequent updates with better rankings. In those days, many legal blogs weren’t client focused as much as they were search engine focused. Publishing online content was widely viewed as a box you had to check, and still is for many firms, which is why most lawyers don’t see positive ROI from content marketing.

You still hear this a lot: “I don’t have time to blog, I pay a service to do it for me” or “I mainly copy paste news stories to my blog, it’s easy and keeps things updated.”

The problem is that Google has become a much pickier eater. They’re no longer impressed with a bags and bags of White Castle, they’re looking instead for the choicest filet mignon. Thin, ghost written content that used to rank, or at least send positive signals,  has been removed from the top of the SERPs and the trend will only continue. In fact, numerous poor quality or syndicated pages can actually hurt the overall performance of your entire site.

Most Legal Topics Aren’t QDF Searches; New Pages Don’t Mean Much, But Social Engagement Does

While freshness signals are still a ranking factor, they’re one of over 200 Google uses to evaluate a page. Robotically posting low quality news stories and poorly written ghost blogs is a waste of time and won’t help your site from an SEO standpoint. According to Search Engine Watch, Google is taking a more “nuanced” approach to freshness signals:

Heading forward, Google will take a more “nuanced” approach to ranking changes based on “freshness factors.” To accomplish this, Google has launched a change to one of the signals it uses to identify fresh documents. Additionally, Google has modified a classifier to identity and exclude content it decides is “particularly low-quality.”

Google’s head of web spam, Matt Cutts, recently indicated that freshness is primarily a factor for sites, such as newspapers, that cover current events. Some queries require freshness, while others don’t.

While legal blogs do occasionally cover the latest developments in case law, most successful publishers relay black letter law in a format clients can easily digest. Essentially, they assist with research. Much of what is written on a bankruptcy or criminal law blog will maintain validity for a long time. In other words, legal topics typically are not query deserve freshness (“QDF”) searches.

In my experience, firms who hire ghost bloggers, or who still view content as nothing more than a box to be checked, are typically flying in the dark when it comes to analytics. They aren’t actively measuring the ROI their content produces. If they were, they wouldn’t be paying for content that has almost zero chance of receiving meaningful visits from search. In other words, show me a ghost written legal blog and I’ll show you a site with no traffic. By contrast, readers engage with thoughtful, well written content both on the publisher’s site and via social media. Social engagement is a hallmark of useful content, which is what Google wants to promote.

The Reason to Publish a Blog

There is one reason and one reason only to publish a legal blog: to demonstrate expertise. That’s it. Forget SEO and start thinking trust. Whether you’re a bankruptcy, whistleblower, class action or divorce attorney, your clients are facing a problem. They usually can’t, or don’t want to, broadcast it to the world. They haven’t heard of you, but they have heard of Google, so that’s where they turn first.

They trust Google.

They search Google for answers, i.e. how will this problem affect me legally? If you’re there with answers to their questions, if you can demonstrate command of the issues, if you’ve “been there before,” they’re likely to get in touch so you can help them too. Reading your analysis builds trust that translates into new business.

That’s how legal blogging works today. More generally, that’s how the web works today (see Google’s Authorship program).

Freshness signals are nice, but the goal is to demonstrate expertise. That’s what both Google and clients are looking for.