A recent post on LexBlog highlights the importance of knowing what you’re doing or what others are doing for you when you seek to boost your Google juice by purchasing links or engaging in “excessive” link exchanges. In his post FindLaw gaming Google? Kevin O’Keefe reviews what FindLaw are doing for lawyer customers for $1,000 per month and quotes Google’s webmaster guidelines which suggest that’s money not just down the drain, but backing the drain up:
Buying or selling links that pass Google PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results. Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such.
Read the full post and much related discussion.
Later: Steve Matthews’ post on the topic looks at the story from a different angle. Were FindLaw just guilty of being arrogant?
Black hat tactics are short sighted. While there is some value in getting links back to your site, it is just a waste of time to spend time and effort (and money) gaming the system.
In the law blog word, content (good content) will rule every time.