It’s pretty clear when you read through the comments on the blogosphere backing Findlaw that either:

1. These are Findlaw employees defending Findlaw
2. The people defending Findlaw do not understand the situation completely.

Let me make this perfectly clear: Findlaw is lying to their clients and to the public. They ARE selling links to law firms.

Now why would they lie? Why would they say “No, we are not selling links to law firms” when they are? The short simple answer is money. As an ex Findlaw employee I can say through experience that they are more concerned about profit margins and sales numbers then they are about the success of their clients. Findlaw does not want to refund any part of the millions of dollars the sales of the links packages has generated (read the comments of FormerFL Rep who by the way is not me).

There’s a lot of good people over there and I have friends there. But that doesn’t change the fact that what they are doing is wrong. Law firms come to Findlaw to help them with their Internet advertising and sometimes Findlaw does a good job of that. Their legal directory gets a large amount of traffic and it can be a good source of attorney referrals. However, what most attorneys are concerned about is getting their website high visibility in the search engines, namely Google since that search engine dominates search market share and thus provides the best opportunity for generating new clientele. By breaking Google’s rule against the sale of links that can impact rankings, Findlaw is putting their clients at risk from being able to generate clients from the best source when it comes to the search engines. Google webmaster guidelines state:
“Practices that violate our guidelines may result in a negative adjustment of your site’s presence in Google, or even the removal of your site from our index.”
Google’s webmaster guidelines also state:
“Ultimately, you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire”.
This means law firms can be punished for buying links from Findlaw. Even if they don’t know that it breaks Google’s guidelines. The great majority of lawyers have absolutely no idea that this goes against Google’s rules but unfortunately they are still responsible. What happens often in cases like these is Google will prevent the links pages that Findlaw is selling from passing any link value to the law firm websites. So, you have some law firms spending upwards of $30,000 a year for links that do not help their rankings. That is just sad. These links are definitely not meant to provide traffic so that is not even a possible argument. You can see some of the pages that Findlaw is selling by clicking on the “more” link located in the footer. That page leads to a page that links to a handful of the links pages. Obviously, that is not meant to provide traffic considering it is practically hidden at the bottom of the page.

Law firms who are considering buying the links packages from Findlaw need to know all this. Does anyone really believe that law firms would buy these links packages if they were told that they could be penalized by Google or that the links could potentially be worthless? I don’t think so. I don’t blame the Findlaw sales reps though because the reps don’t even know that it’s against Google guidelines. They say what they are told by corporate and corporate is not telling their sales reps the whole story.