The Rainmaker Blog : Law Firm Marketing and Business Development : The Rainmaker Institute : Stephen Fairley : Professional Legal Marketing

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Last week Google announced a major change to its search engine algorithm to punish websites known as “content farms” -- a common term for sites that have a lot of low quality or copied content in an attempt to attract search engines.

Google said that about 12 percent of its queries would be impacted, and a lot of site rankings will be affected as Google seeks to reduce the rankings for low quality sites. 

Conversely, Google’s changes will elevate the page rank of sites with high quality content – research, reports, analysis, etc. PageRank (PR) is Google’s ranking system that indicates how authoritative and credible your website is.

Named after Google co-founder Larry Page, here’s how Google explains PageRank:

When Google was founded, one key innovation was PageRank, a technology that determined the “importance” of a webpage by looking at what other pages link to it, as well as other data. Today we use more than 200 signals, including PageRank, to order websites, and we update these algorithms on a weekly basis.

Every single website is ranked on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest. You can check your website’s PR at www.prchecker.info.

However, it's important to note PR is like the Richter scale. Each step up is a multiple of 10. So a PR of 4 is 10 times more powerful in Google’s eyes than a PR of 3. Very few websites in the legal industry ever rise above a 3 or 4.

At The Rainmaker Institute our primary website (www.TheRainmakerInstitute.com) is a PR of 4. Our blog (www.TheRainmakerBlog.com), because we update more frequently, is a PR of 5!  There's only a handful of legally related websites in the U.S. that have a PR of 7 or more (Nolo and FindLaw are two of them).

The bottom line is, if you reward your site visitors with fresh, credible and relevant content, then Google will reward you with a higher search engine ranking.

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