SEARCH AND DECEIVE
A Web trick catches a venerable law directory
In response to O’Keefe’s posting,
Conscious Solutions, a British mar-
keting outfit, took responsibility
for spamming Turkewitz’s blog to
help increase traffic to martindale
-hubbell.co.uk.
By Rachel M. Zahorsky
FOR NEW YORK CITY-BASED LAWYER AND BLOGGER ERIC TURKEWITZ, “comment spam” is a common occurrence. Like graffiti artists, some commenters sprinkle Turkewitz’s popular New York Personal Injury Law Blog with unrelated gibberish accompanied by links that point back to their own websites.
The purpose is to boost those websites’ rankings on search engines such
as Google when users search for keywords. Higher rankings mean more
click-throughs and, often, more money.
Comment spam and other tricks to achieve search engine optimization,
or SEO, are old—some nearly as old as search engines—and many have
been countered in search engine algorithms. Still, with the big business
SEO has become, the tricksters keep trying.
In December a comment on a 2-year-old post caused even Turkewitz’s
jaw to drop.
“The comment, at first blush, didn’t look like spam,” Turkewitz wrote
on his blog. “The sentences, however, had nothing to do with the post.”
And the HTML link below the unrelated sentences directed users to the
international
law firm di-
rectory of
Martindale-
Hubbell, one
of the largest
and oldest at-
torney-search
companies,
which touts
Web 2.0 exper-
tise to lawyers.
Turkewitzs ays
he found the
same posting
on several blog
sites.
“What is
most surprising
here is that a
venerable company is getting
down in the
gutterw ith
companiesl ess
reputable,”
says Seattle
lawyer Kevin
O’Keefe, who
wrote about
the incident
on his weblog,
Real Lawyers
Have Blogs.
WITH THE PROLIFERATION OF SOCIAL
media forums and fly-by-night legal
directories, lawyers need to be even
more cautious when they enlist the
services of outside sales and marketing firms to improve website
traffic and search engine rankings.
“Lawyers make that mistake to
reach out to companies that do
search engine optimization,” says
O’Keefe. His company, LexBlog,
advises lawyers on ways to become
better bloggers, including doing
their own SEO. But the gains that
law websites may enjoy from using
an outside firm can become ques-
tionable. “Their sites start to do
better, and the lawyers don’t have a
clue that these companies conduct
black hat operations [like comment
spamming] to get those ratings.”
“If you are going to use social
media and blog, you should never
have somebody do that for you,”
O’Keefe adds. He says the best way
to raise your online profile is to pub-
lish valuable and credible content
that engages readers in conversation
and encourages them to reference
those posts on the Web.
Google has addressed comment
spam on its Webmaster Central Blog
and dismissed the spammy link
drops as a waste of time. The search
engine giant has developed algorithmic ways to devalue these types of
links, which makes the spammer’s
effort useless.
To boost search engine rankings,
the Google webmasters echoed
O’Keefe’s and Turkewitz’s advice:
Avoid attempting to trick computers
that monitor keywords, and instead
post valuable and credible content.
And for marketers who promise
results through shady tactics?
“The only thing we can do about
these services is to walk with our
pocketbooks,” O’Keefe says. “If we
don’t use less reputable companies,
they won’t survive.” ■
