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An article of interest I noticed on the Dow Jones Newswires and the Wall Street Journal. http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20080904-712457.html Since I used to work for Findlaw I thought this was interesting. I wonder what effects this will have on customers who bought this product. It seems to have been talked about quite a bit on blogs across the country. Click on the image on the left to see all of the blog posts
By Nat Worden
Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
Thomas Newell jumped at the chance to buy a search engine marketing service for his small Pennsylvania law firm's Web site in July. But he soon found himself in the middle of a public spat between Google Inc. (GOOG) and FindLaw, one of the most highly trafficked portals for legal information on the Internet.
FindLaw, a subsidiary of the business information giant Thomson Reuters Corp. (TRI), built Newell his Web site last spring and primed it to appear in major search engines for a fee of about $1,600 per month. It was such a success that one year later Newell was willing to sign up for the SEM Advantage product, costing another $2,000 a month. Billed as a "high-octane" way to double or even triple traffic on his site, Newell and others like him understood FindLaw's SEM Advantage product to be a package of well-placed links designed to lift a Web site's standing in a Google search. But now they're wondering if they're still getting their money's worth.
Late last month, FindLaw quietly made changes to a link on one of its Web sites leading to Newell's site, which he had received as part of SEM Advantage. It also changed at least 99 other links to the Web sites of law-firm clients after it ran afoul of Google Inc. (GOOG) in the search giant's ongoing efforts to crack down on a practice known as selling "link juice," or Web links designed to boost a Web site's page rankings in a search engine. With the link juice trade springing up as a cottage industry across the entire spectrum of online marketing, Google views it as threatening the quality of its search engine, an asset that has made Google a dominant force in media.
"Link-selling is very widespread, and it's a problem that's not going away," said Danny Sullivan, editor in chief of SearchEngineLand.com. "It has affected a lot of people online that feel that Google is an evil company. They created a link economy, and now they don't want people to cash in on it."
To be sure, there's nothing illegal about link-selling, and while it does run counter to proper industry practices, according to some Internet search experts, others don't have a problem with it.
"There's nothing wrong with selling links, and there's nothing wrong with Google trying to stop it," said Todd Friesen, a search expert and industry blogger who sparked a firestorm of criticism on the Web when he commented on FindLaw. "It's all part of the SEO (search engine optimization) game. Those who are selling links just have to be careful to explain the risks involved to their clients."
For its part, FindLaw caught the attention of Matt Cutts, the head of Google's Webspam team, when he was recently forwarded an email sent out by the company's sales team to prospective clients. The sales pitch offered "up to three hard coded links" for $1,000 per month as part of its new SEM program designed to "leverage FindLaw's authoritative position as the top online destination" for lawyers.
John Shaughnessy, a FindLaw spokesman, said the email was an "unauthorized communication" about a new corporate advertising product called SEM-Corporate, launched in July.
"The use of the words 'hard coded links' and 'for sale' in the document incorrectly implied the intent to sell links," said Shaughnessy in an email. "This was not a law-firm product. To address any potential product confusion with our law-firm products, we immediately canceled the SEM-Corporate product and fully refunded our corporate advertising clients who had purchased it."
Shortly after Cutts received FindLaw's sales email, Google briefly lowered FindLaw's so-called toolbar PageRank in its search engine from 7 to 5, a move that Steve Mathews, founder of the search engine optimization firm Stem Legal, describes as the difference between two notches on the Richter scale.
"That basically pulls the rug out from under FindLaw in terms of the value they can deliver to clients by selling links," said Matthews.
Google uses links to spider across the Web in pursuit of key words relevant to any given query that a user may enter into its search field. Links are also a key indicator of a Web site's proper standing in Google's search results.
When a highly ranked site like FindLaw links to another site without receiving any payment in return, search engines view that as a vote in favor of the link's destination site, and that boosts its ranking in a search. When a link on a popular site is paid for, that's viewed as a lesser vote for the site that bought it. So in many cases, webmasters are asked to tag paid links with coding that will prevent them from passing search rank on to the sites that pay for them.
"In cases in which we feel that sites are attempting to use links to manipulate rankings, which includes the buying and selling of links for the clear purpose of passing PageRank, we make adjustments to counterbalance and also discourage those efforts," said Google spokesman Eitan Bencuya. "At the end of the day though, we realize that our users must be able to consistently find relevant results whenever they search."
FindLaw's high page rank was restored by Google within days, but around that time, the company added coding to links on its Web pages leading to law firm clients, like Newell, preventing its high search rank from being transferred to the Web sites of clients that bought the SEM Advantage product.
"While not required by Google, we chose to place [the coding] on some links to avoid even the appearance of noncompliance with relevant Google guidelines," said Shaughnessy. He declined to say how many links in total were changed, but he did say the same coding was added to thousands of links across FindLaw properties over the past several months in order to "optimize site performance." Shaughnessy said the SEM Advantage product contains a wide variety of services, including consulting with customers about Web site design, content, traffic, conversion and expanded online marketing opportunities. "We do not sell links to law firms," he said.
The controversy comes at a difficult time for FindLaw's parent company, Thomson-Reuters, which publishes a news service that competes directly with Dow Jones Newswires and is delivered on the same terminals. Its stock price is down about 20% over the last year amid concerns that the U.S. financial crisis will quash growth in its financial markets division. Investors are counting on its professional division to pick up the slack, and its legal services business, for which Findlaw is a small but important growth engine, made up 66% of that division's revenue in the first half.
-By Nat Worden, Dow Jones Newswires; 201-938-5216; nat.worden@dowjones.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
09-04-08 1413ET
Copyright (c) 2008 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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