Link building for websites: How to waste your money

May 20, 2:30 PMLaw Practice ExaminerDan Jaffe

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This morning I woke up and checked my websites like usual. Everything was running smoothly but there were too many forum posts for comfort. When I looked at the posts I realized that another lawyer directory was spamming my site, apparently trying to get links back to their own site. The posts that they left made no sense, except for the keyword-rich live URL at the bottom.

I traced the IP addresses of the posters back to India. A world away from most everybody who could get a DUI in the US, or even care about DUI in the US.

The new craze in marketing madness being sold to lawyers and law firms is link building. It goes something like this: You pay company X and they go out and post stuff on your competitors forums and blogs with links back to your own website. The idea is simple enough but there are some pitfalls and outright roadblocks:

1. Most blogs and forums automatically add "no-follow" tags to outbound links, rendering them far less effective from a search engine optimization standpoint;
2. Most good websites are monitored closely, and the owner of the site will usually catch the spam and delete it in a hurry (which I did this morning);
3. Most good websites also have the ability to not only ban users, but to ban IP addresses. I didn't do that this morning, but instead sent an email to the site's owner informing them that I have deleted their spam, and that it will be a wasted effort on my sites;

If you do hire somebody to essentially spam other websites on your behalf (which I highly DON'T recommend), be careful of who you hire. If you hire somebody in India, make sure that they can form complete sentences in English. If a post sounds coherent, it is much likely to survive a spam scan by a website owner. Make sure that your paid website spamming mercenary knows enough about your subject matter to at least cloak the links back to your website within a relevant context of the post. As the owner of a forum, I have to say that a thoughtful post with an outbound link will survive without no-follow tags as long as the content is relevant to my users. If it is not likely to help my users, and its spam, then its gone. Period.

There are many ways to waste money on useless internet activity, and this one tops the list.

About the author: Dan Jaffe is the webmaster of DUIAttorney.com, and an attorney who helps other lawyers and law firms survive the crazy (and sometime predatory) world of internet marketing. He can be reached for questions at 480-951-3200.