LawLytics Blog

Google has grown smarter in the past decade. As a result, Google has managed to find — and close — many of the SEO loopholes that used to be exploited by black hat practitioners. Yet, there is a persistent belief that some of the following black hat SEO practices still work.

In this blog post, we provide an excerpt of our latest eBook and discuss the process of “bootstrapping” your site after it receives a penalty from Google, plus a little detail about how to overcome two specific penalties.

It’s not surprising that many SEO providers market their services by claiming that they can get your site to “the top of Google,” or by flaunting their “partnership” with the search engine. The truth of the matter, however, is less exciting than the promises made by misleading SEO salespeople.

Google is always on the lookout for sites that violate its guidelines and, if you (or a third-party SEO provider you hired) operate in black hat territory, you can bet that you will eventually be caught, and that your law firm website will likely suffer. Learn more about Google penalties in this blog post.

In the third and final release of our “Summer of SEO” series of eBooks, we offer a look at eleven high-profile Google penalties by laying out the guideline violated by each company, the specific consequence those companies faced for failing to play by the rules, as well as the ultimate outcome of each penalty, including how it was eventually overcome (if it was overcome).

On August 1, 2018, Google rolled out an update to its core search algorithm. According to Google, this was a broad, global core update. Learn more about the latest update in this blog post.

Occasionally, Google’s algorithmic updates lead to sweeping changes in the placement of sites on search engine results pages (SERPs). When such algorithmic rollouts are instituted, attorneys who follow the LawLytics recipe for effective, content-based SEO and online marketing practices can rest easy knowing that their sites are likely to be rewarded on SERPs for adhering to Google’s guidelines.

This is the first post in a series about black hat SEO — the optimization methods that do not follow search engine guidelines and that focus on tricking search engines into ranking subpar websites and web pages higher than they would normally merit. Posts in the series will focus on the past, present, and future of black hat SEO tactics and why attorneys should avoid these methods when building their law firm’s web presence.

In the words of Mike McDermott (played by Matt Damon) in the 1998 film Rounders, which is a film centered around the game of poker: “If you can’t spot the sucker in your first half hour at the table, then you are the sucker.” Don’t be the sucker when it comes to marketing your law firm online. Read on to see how we cover that concept in our second SEO eBook, “Betting on a Long Shot.”