Internet Marketing for Attorneys: Giving Google What It Loves, Part 2 of 2
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Here is the second installment on how link building works and some of the major variables that effect link building strategies, as well as how links directly impact your search engine rankings for specific key terms:
Google can “lose” an inbound link. Not everyone knows that even Google forgets sometimes! Link building experts have found that just because Google “finds” a particular inbound link this month does not guarantee they will “find it” next month. This seems to happen much less frequently if the inbound link comes from a major website, like CNN.com, huffingtonpost.com, a major newspaper in your local area, an educational or governmental website, or one of the top 500 websites on the net, but those links are extremely difficult to obtain and even harder to sustain! With small sites, like a link from a blog by an attorney in Topeka, Kansas or an article you wrote in an article directory like ezinearticles.com, Google may recognize and count the link this month, but seem to “forget” it exists the next month.
“Do Follow” and “No Follow” Links. Webmasters have the ability in their website coding to turn all their outbound web links to either “do follow” or “no follow.” They can also have a combination of both, which is what most websites do. A “no follow” link is embedded in the code and tells Google “do not follow this link,” which has the result of stopping Google’s search engine spider cold in its tracks. Essentially, you are telling Google “I like this website enough to link to it, but not enough to give it some of my good ‘Google juice’.”
A “do follow” link encourages Google to follow and count the inbound link. The average reader cannot tell the difference, but Google sure can! If you click on a “no follow” link you can still go to that website or page it's linking to, but if Google’s search spider comes across a “no follow” link it stops and usually does not count that as an inbound link.
It takes a special tool for SEO experts to identify “no follow” links. So what does this have to do with link building strategies? Because websites can change. Let's say you have spent dedicated time and effort in building inbound links to your website, perhaps even buying a few back links (be careful because most of the time Google considers buying links to be a “black hat” technique that can get you banned) and you confirm all of them are “do follow” links. Yet the very next month the webmaster may easily change all their outbound links to be “no follow” links or they can make all the links on certain pages (like their recommended resources page) to be “no follow” links or any variation thereof. Clearly, the only person who has control over this is the individual webmaster and there is no incentive for them to tell you what they are doing. It's up to you to manually check.
What other websites are linking to. Here's where it starts to get really tricky. For the last few years, Google has been taking a bigger snapshot of the internet so it's no longer just a matter of who you are linking to and who is linking to you, but who is linking to the website who is linking to you. Did you follow that?
For example, let's say website 1 has good Google ranking and they have been linking to your law firm website and Google is rewarding you with higher search results because of this. But this month, website 1 has decided to link to website 2, which for some reason Google does not like. Perhaps website 2 is an MLM company with a bad online reputation, but is offering website 1 a big affiliate commission if any of their products are sold on website 1. When Google finds this out, it can not only hurt the ranking of website 1, because by linking to website 2 they are no longer a ‘pristine’ or reputable website in Google’s eyes. Its credibility has taken a hit simply because of linking to website 2. In turn, this can negatively affect your rankings because your website is now linked to “less than reputable” website 1.
Think about when you are buying a house. It's not just the condition of the house that you are concerned about. It's also who the neighbors are and even the reputation of the surrounding community or even the town. Google analyzes website linking the same way you take all these factors into consideration when purchasing a home—your home (your website), your neighbors (who links to you), the surrounding community (who is linking to the websites who link to you), and the town the house is in (the larger context of connections and linking patterns).
For most attorneys learning the nuances of power link building is not the best use of their time. You need to know the fundamentals so you don’t get taken advantage of, but if you are serious about generating more leads from the Internet then you need to be on the home page of Google for the key terms your prospects search for online.
The best way to do that is by working with a top-notch link-building expert who knows the legal industry and has proven results. Here's the good news, you don’t have to do this alone! If you're tired of seeing your competitors’ websites at the top of every search term and you're ready to hire a top link building expert, call me at 480-659-9700 or send me an email at Stephen@TheRainmakerInstitute.com and I'll be glad to make a couple of recommendations.
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