Findlaw Busted for Scamming Lawyers?

Whoa!! I just got this forwarded to me by a bunch of my Attorney Web clients. Looks like Findlaw was up to no good trying to circumvent the natural evolution of organic search. Honestly, I got confused reading what they were offering. I think Oilman did a great job of breaking it down, in a humorous way, exactly what Findlaw was doing for SEO (click to read)

Many of our clients are ex-Findlaw people and have other horror stories about their web design and search engine optimization practices.

Natural or organic search is exactly that. Whenever you "buy" links and try to incorporate that into the organic world, you will get in trouble by the Google police. If you want to buy links to your site, go for it! It's not illegal, nor is it frowned upon by Google - not at all!

It's just called ADWORDS. 

What Findlaw Did Wrong

Findlaw is (or was) allegedly trying to sell links to upset the delicate balance of natural placement by PageRank. 

PageRank is simply how popular your page is to other web pages. It is a critical element to the way Google measures sites naturally and FAIRLY against each other.

Here's another lawyer blog that provides another view of what happened to Findlaw. 

Stick to adding relevant content to your website for the services you offer and you will be fine.

What About DSS?

DSS does not do anything tricky like that. At FWM, we make sure that we do not do anything, or advise our clients to do anything, that will hurt them on the search engines. DSS is designed to be an easy to use tool to update your website in the areas that matter most to Google while still paying careful attention and respect to the natural balance of organic search.

PageRank is a naturally occurring event in that other website will link to your page if it is relevant thereby increasing your PageRank status. DSS gives you easy and fast access to deploy your content and links to others. DSS promotes the social aspect of the web without trying trick the search engines.