RECAP attempts to subvert PACER fees

If you haven’t heard about RECAP, a Firefox extension used to subvert PACER fees, you’re missing out.  In short, the extension runs in the background as you use PACER, and if the document you’re about to pay for is available for free elsewhere, RECAP points you to it instead; if the document isn’t available for free elsewhere, RECAP will upload the document to a database where others can download it for free after you pay for it.  Using the extension is legal and usually consistent with PACER terms of use.

Many lawyers and librarians, annoyed at having to pay for documents that are not copyrightable, welcome the plugin, seeing it as the beginning or a new age where court documents are available freely and easily.  But is RECAP really poised to do that?

The authenticity problem

If you use your imagination a bit and look at what’s happened with other technologies, RECAP, although well intentioned, may not end up achieving its goals unless the courts cooperate.

The problem stems from the fact that when you get a document from RECAP’s free database instead of PACER’s, you don’t know the document is authentic.  Conceivably, you could download a document that’s adulterated in some way and you wouldn’t know it.  The makers of RECAP admit this flaw and lament that it wouldn’t be an issue if the court would use digital signature technology.   So, in the event you need to ensure your documents are authentic,  they recommend you pay for PACER.

Online music downloading parallels

If you look at what’s happened to other technologies and you can see where this might lead.  To use music downloading as an analogy (albeit an imperfect one because it’s illegal), one of the reasons people pay for music at iTunes instead of download it for free (besides legality) is because online sharing sites are rife with garbled and sometimes virus-laden tracks.

Would-be music downloaders waste time and endure frustration trying to download authentic tracks, and eventually decide it’s easier to just pay a buck for a guaranteed authentic version.   Record companies know this, so they deliberately spread garbled tracks to make buying from them more attractive.

Vandals, saboteurs, hackers, and more…

If court records are ever completely “freed” from PACER, and the court does not adopt digital signature technology, court document sharers could end up experiencing the exact same problem as illegal music sharers.

The possibilities are many — vandals might deliberately upload flawed documents; for-profit court document providers might poison the free well so you have to pay for their bottled water; hackers might infect documents with viruses; or unintentional glitches could alter documents.

The existence of such problems would be more than enough to keep a pay-for-documents system like PACER alive.  Now, are problems in legal document sharing ever going to reach the scale and scope of music sharing? Probably not, but how much risk are lawyers willing to bear to avoid paying 8 cents per page?  After all, if people would rather pay for good music when all that’s at stake is entertainment, then certainly lawyers would pay for good documents when millions of dollars are at stake.

Digital signature technology is not just a footnote in the RECAP story

The free court document train could easily run off the tracks if courts don’t start using digital signature technology.  And, consequently, if courts are really interested in electronic public access to documents, they should adopt it now.  Without cooperation from the courts, or other ways to solve the authentication problem, noble efforts like RECAP may never amount to more than cheap, risky substitutes.

For some reason my brain has been in heavy management-mode lately. Maybe it’s because it’s review time at Avvo again; maybe it’s because management is a big part of what I do. Whatever the case, my two latest Avvocating installments on the Law.com Legal Technology Blog both contemplate management issues, but from different ends of the corporate ladder. The first, entitled “The Power of One . . . on One,” looks down the ladder and encourages law firm managers to utilize a framework of constant communication with their employees. At Avvo, we utilize weekly meetings, called “one-on-ones,” and they are very effective.

The second, entitled “The God Complex: A Necessary Evil,” looks up the ladder and speaks to young lawyers fed up with their franchise partner’s egotistical and unwavering behavior. It asks the young lawyers to consider whether such behavior is an important component of the team’s success, as it often is.

Happy reading. I hope it’s light on the pontificating. (I say that to cover the tracks of my God Complex. ;-))

Mark

You’d be surprised what you can learn from spammers

At first glance, you might not think there’s anything to be learned from online pill spammers, other than a poetic mastery of the English language that produces jewels like “Order now and let your carnal life turn into the bright fest of pleasure!”

But there is one reason to pay attention to pill spammers, at least in the SEO space – they do rank for some of the most competitive terms on the Net, where millions of dollars are at stake.  And in the confusing world of SEO, filled with misinformation and verbose, self-proclaimed experts of questionable expertise, wouldn’t it be nice to know what you’re hearing actually works?

Don’t try this at home

I am not advocating anyone copy spammer tactics, nor am I suggesting doing anything against Google’s rules.  What I am advocating is understanding how spammers are able to manipulate Google, because doing so reveals a lot about how Google works, and therefore informs your understanding of SEO.  Once you’ve got that understanding, you can use it an ethical manner.

Spammers are surprisingly effective at exploiting Google

Pill spammers know how to play Google like a violin.  Type queries into Google like “buy Viagra” or “buy Tramadol” and you might be surprised whom you’ll find there.   After all, these are high-value keywords that millions of people search for, so Google must’ve found a way to keep these results free of spam, right?  Err, not really…. Here is a screenshot of Google’s “buy Tramadol” results below.  Notice anything fishy about it?

Why is TechNet selling Tramadol? Or how about the Ellis Island Foundation? Or Mayville State University? They’re not.  These websites have either been hacked or allow users to create profiles, which spammers misuse to sell pills.

Parasite hosting in a nutshell

The spamming technique you see above is called “parasite hosting,” and it works by exploiting Google’s bias in favor of trusted domains.

One of the ways Google tries to keep spammy sites out of its index is to decide which domains it can trust.  After it decides that a domain is trusted, it grants it a sort of a halo effect, where anything published on the domain gets a boost in the rankings (see Wikipedia’s ubiquitous high rankings for everything under the sun as a prime example). Parasite hosting uses Google’s own anti-spam defense mechanism against it by placing spam on trusted domains.

How spammers use parasite hosting

SEO spammers find established, trusted websites they can hack into, and then once they gain access to the websites, they host  sales pages on on them (often without the owner knowing).  Alternatively, the spammer can avoid hacking into websites by registering profiles on trusted forums or social networking sites, and then misusing them as sales pages.  The end result is the same – the spammer uses a trusted website to host his sales page because he knows that Google will rank his page much more easily than if he used his own website.

Add links, stir, let marinate and enjoy

After the spammer uses someone else’s website to host his Tramadol sales page, that’s not enough to rank highly in Google for competitive keywords.  Although Google grants trusted sites a halo effect, the halo effect is not so strong that page ranks highly on its own.  Rather, the spammer needs to build inlinks to the parasite page, with the anchor text “buy Tramadol.” When you combine links with a trusted page, Google tends to rank the page highly.

So at this point the spammer uses automated tools to spam/hack websites and insert anchor text optimized links to his parasite hosted page.  This can be done in several ways, two of which are using automated forum/blog spam software or hacking into websites and inserting links (Avvoblog, unfortunately, has had to deal with this a few times as well).

Lessons you can apply

Okay, so now you’ve learned the sleazy tactics of spammers, but what does this have to do with legal marketing online? Well, if it wasn’t already clear before, the magic formula in Google is…

Trusted domain + anchor text optimized links = high rankings

Spammers have proven the formula works to an embarrassing degree for Google, and although they’ve exploited it using unethical and illegal means, you can ethically use it to your advantage as well.  All too often, lawyers leave out one of the two essential ingredients and then wonder why they’re not doing well in Google.

Lesson 1: Make Google trust you

If you have a website that’s competing for very competitive keywords, you need to build your own halo effect to succeed.  You do this by getting other trusted websites to link to you.

Can you get a link from your college? Your law school? Are you a member of any reputable associations that can link to you? Do you sponsor any charities that could link to you?  Will the media link to you?  If you start thinking this way, you can find opportunities to build links from trusted websites.  Building trust is a difficult and slow process, but one that is becoming increasingly important to Google.  In fact, the CEO of Google recently alluded to further reliance on brands (which can be read as domain trust) to weed out spam.

Lesson 2: Use trust to gauge what’s realistic in SEO and act accordingly

If your website isn’t trusted by Google, you’re probably not going to rank highly for “mesothelioma lawyer” any time soon.  And if you don’t have the requisite time or inclination to build a trust-halo effect on your own website, then it may be smarter to get yourself on a website that’s already trusted.  Spammers do this through hacking, but you don’t have to.  Get yourself a profile on Avvo, Linkedin, Justia, etc.  Google already views these domains as trusted, so your efforts may be better spent promoting your profile on these websites rather than starting from scratch with your own.

Lesson 3: Use trust in reputation management

Let’s say there’s a web page out there that says something unflattering about you.  The only way you’re going to make it “go away” is by bumping it down in the search results.  Again, this is an opportunity to use trusted domains to your advantage.  Create profiles on as many trusted domains as possible, link to them, and watch them bump off the unflattering web page.   By cultivating a presence on multiple trusted websites early on, you can even create a defense around your name that will be hard to break down.

Lesson 4:  SEO friendly is not enough — you need links

Nothing you can do on your website alone will be sufficient to rank for highly competitive terms.   Links are what really give a webpage the PageRank it needs to rank highly, and your domain’s trust determines how many links you’ll need.   Spammers know this and so they get thousands of links even after securing a trusted webpage.  Lawyers often forget this and think their web page for “DUI lawyer” will rank just because it’s there and it’s “SEO friendly.”  It won’t.  Just because Google can find and crawl your website easily doesn’t mean it’s putting it on the first page.

Follow the formula

At the end of the day, parasite hosting is just a clever, albiet often illegal, way of exploiting Google’s reliance on trust and links.  Make trust and links your goal, pursue them ethically, and you too can rank highly (minus the sleaze).

Last week I wrote a post called “I’m in my underwear and I use Findlaw (and Twitter)” about Findlaw using pictures of girls in their underwear on Twitter to drive traffic to Findlaw. It seems someone has made a business of using Twitter accounts with profile pictures of young girls in their underwear tweeting product endorsements. The concept is fairly simple: create an automated program that follows enough people on twitter to avoid the Twitter spam detectors, add a profile picture of a suggestive young girl and start tweeting links to paying clients. Enough people will have their eye caught by the inadequate bikini to read her tweet about being “layed off and they gave my job to some one else” and then click on the accompanying link. Sex and spam converge on the Internet’s next hot success, Twitter.

The salesman who sold Findlaw on the Twitter Spam concept apparently turned to Lawyers.com and scored his next sale. Check out the profile pictures of the young girls in the last 6 Twitter posts about Lawyers.com:

I promise the Avvo marketing staff will keep our clothes on. We’ll all be happier that way.

1) TAMARA MICHELLE CROSS of San Diego, CA

(Not pictured)

2) HOWARD WOODLEY BAILEY of Newark, NJ

3) NORMAN VICTORINO of Lake Zurich, IL

(Not pictured)

4) JOHN M. KAMAN of San Francisco, CA

5) PAMELA KOSLYN of Hollywood, CA

6) ALAN JAMES BRINKMEIER of Chicago, IL

7) BLAIR FREDERICK PAUL of Seattle, WA

(Not pictured)

8 ) WILLIAM C. HEAD of Atlanta, GA

9) THOMAS W NAWALANY of Portland, OR

(Not pictured)

10) GARY C. FURLONG of Seattle, WA

(Not pictured)

Newsweek turned to Avvo CEO (and former senior counsel for the SEC), Mark Britton, for a story on “Should you sue your financial adviser?”. The story comes from the Bernie Madoff scandal as well as a slew of lawsuits filed against financial advisers by high profile celebrities including Michael Vick, Sly Stallone, and Jaromir Jagr. A couple key points from Mark:

“Your financial adviser should be treated no differently than any other employee you work with.”

“Some signs that clients should watch for is when you adviser stops communicating with you.”

“Talk is cheap, and talk is very hard to prove in court.”

Back in the 1960′s, Houston became home to the first major artificial playing field – the original, inglorious, Astrodome. So it’s only fitting that the largest city in Texas can now proudly claim title to the reigning king of “astroturfing”: In online parlance, the practice of buffing up one’s reputation by posting phony user reviews online.

Houston criminal defense attorney Andy Nolen – or someone who has a stake in Mr. Nolen’s online reputation – has been posting, on Yahoo Local, positive reviews of Mr. Nolen and scathingly negative reviews of his competition. 31 posts, all on Houston attorneys, all negative, except for one: Andy Nolen.

Others have filled in the backstory on Nolen, including consummate Texas bloggers and attorneys Mark Bennett, John Floyd and Cynthia Henley. Let’s just say that much like the astroturf that was rushed into Houston’s dome to replace a failed go at growing grass indoors, Andy Nolen’s ersatz reviews appear to be an attempt to substitute for courtroom success that failed to thrive.

What’s important to note is that “astroturfing” is more than just juvenile and corrosive of the quality of information that consumers are growing to demand from online marketplaces. It’s also illegal. Just last month the New York Attorney General’s office announced the successful prosecution of an astroturfing plastic surgery concern, resulting in a $300,000 settlement and injunctive relief.

Professor Eric Goldman, a leading authority on internet law and online forums, has noted the importance of online reputational ecosystems and the need to keep them as open as possible. As these systems build out, real feedback will drown out or expose any artificial reviews. Attempts to flame the competition or astroturf should be aggressively reported to site operators, but the best of all cures for this behavior is more input from clients.

By the way, if you want to review your lawyer, you can do so here: Avvo Lawyer Reviews. But astroturfers take note – Avvo reads every review before deciding whether it gets posted.

It’s been a while since we’ve talked about Avvo Advertising, which launched earlier this year. Avvo has some exciting news: we have now launched reporting for all Avvo Ads, so lawyers can see how well their ads are converting. We have wanted to deliver this for some time, and now it is here. We stand behind our product, with a satisfaction guarantee because we are generating real business for our advertisers.

A quick refresher on Avvo Advertising:
• Two ad formats – Sponsored Listings, which are text ads and a Display Ads –square visual banners. You can see examples of both on our Seattle DUI Lawyer Page.
• Massive exposure – Sponsored Listings and Display Ads are targeted by practice area and geography to relevant search results, Avvo Answers and Legal Guides pages.
• 100% Satisfaction Guarantee – try Avvo Advertising for 3 months and if, for any reason you aren’t happy, Avvo will refund 100% of your money.
• Proactive Account Management – we regularly analyze and monitor your campaigns to ensure Avvo generates prospective clients in a cost-effective manner.
• Reporting – we deliver a monthly analysis of your advertising campaign so you know how your ads are performing.

So I’m perusing my “Findlaw” search on Tweetdeck tonight and I run across Daphne Cedrick, who has tweeted, “failure to show up for Jail sentence – Criminal Law – FindLaw Answers http://bit.ly/ZIIf4″. Well Daphne, you seem like such a nice girl and you certainly aren’t dressed for the big house. Didn’t anyone warn you about posting pictures of yourself like that online?

Interestingly, I run across some of Daphne’s sorority sisters including Erika, Flora, Milly, Megan, Rene, Alana, Jessica, Ida, Anne and yes, even Cherry, all young girls seeking legal help on Findlaw in the comfort of their bare essentials. In fact, 6 of the past 7 tweets regarding Findlaw look like an audition for Girls Gone Wild Goes to Law School. Some of the tweets are memorable too, “PLEASE HELP ME!!! I’M BEGGING YOU. . . ” As of midnight tonight, here’s a screenshot of a Twitter search for “Findlaw”:

What’s going on here? If I had to guess, I’d say this is one of two things: 1)a pure traffic play – let’s see if twitter SPAM hotties can drive traffic or 2)an SEO linkbuilding play (note the optimized anchor text “father deceased no will . . .” and “Does Discrimination Against Gay Men . . . “) This isn’t so far fetched – remember the Findlaw link selling scandal? If you look into the Twitter profile for each of these girls (I did, but it was just for work – really), you’ll see they all follow 20 people, they all have awkward usernames like “erik8hzqb”, and they all tweet nothing but product endorsements. (Presumably, the 20 people they follow are there to throw off Twitter’s automated anti-spam detectors.) Images of young girls in their underwear have been able to sell light beer for decades – I guess it might work as Twitterspam for websites. I’m just amazed that someone actually made a business out of this. For now, the Avvo marketing staff will keep our clothes on – I really think this is best for everyone, don’t you?

Google gives a sneak peak of its updated search engine infrastructure

On August 10th Google revealed a “secret project” it has been working on – Google Caffeine – and people can even take it for a test drive before it’s live.  Slated as a new and improved infrastructure, Caffeine promises to improve the “size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions” of Google’s index.  These improvements are said to be “under the hood,” meaning that “users won’t notice a difference in search results.“  Matt Cutts of Google elaborated, saying, “most of the changes are in things like our core indexing, so there’s less changes for things like rankings.  Lots of users won’t notice a big difference.”

From reading those excerpts and looking at the name “Caffeine,” it’s clear the brunt of the improvements center around the speed and comprehensiveness of the Google index, not the ranking algorithm.  However, Google did mention rank and said power users might notice some differences, so there is still reason to be concerned about rankings.

The effects on Avvo

To see the effect of Caffeine on Avvo, we ran hundreds of queries and compared the results to the new and old Google.  The results were that the rankings were only slightly different on average, with certain types of searches affected more than others.  However, for a small number of keywords, there were some very large differences.  Regarding indexing, Caffeine seems to have indexed about 6% more of Avvo’s pages than the old Google.

But why is Google focusing on its index under the hood instead of on the front end?

While it’s interesting to look at ranking changes in the “new” Google, there are some bigger picture issues worth thinking about – like why is Google so interested in indexing speed? What is Google ultimately trying to do? And how does this all affect your marketing strategy?

Real-time search has been Google’s Achilles heel

One of the most obvious reasons that Google is concentrating on speed is because real-time search engines like Twitter and Facebook have begun fulfilling a need that Google has not.  Namely, while Google is the king of general purpose search, one weakness it has is that it can take days or weeks to crawl new web content and update its index.  Granted, Google is much faster than it used to be, compared to its monthly Google Dances in the past, but it’s still not real time.  And for users who want to hop online to see what’s happening now, they’re increasingly going to Twitter because Google is too slow.

In fact, Google’s lack of real-time search is one of the main reasons for speculation that Google (or other search engines) should acquire Twitter.  This is also probably the main reason why Facebook is getting into real-time search.  However, if Google can successfully make its crawling and indexing so fast that its core search becomes real-time, then Google largely cuts off its competitors at the knees.  Caffeine does not purport to make Google a real-time search engine, but it’s a step in that direction.

So how does Google’s move toward real-time search affect your marketing strategy?

Online marketing, particularly SEO, used to be relatively simple.  Google results didn’t change often, so success meant simply getting your website to rank for a small group of high value keywords, and once you achieved your rankings, they remained fairly stable.

Nowadays, it’s much more complicated, and victory is fleeting:  Rankings change on a daily or hourly basis.  Results can be automatically personalized.  News, pictures, videos, blogs and forums can bump off your website.  People can filter results to only see forums, reviews or new items.  Keyword queries are even becoming longer and more diverse.

This latest push toward real-time search is just one of a long list of changes that are forcing website owners to think beyond simplistic keyword rankings for static websites.

All the more reason to evolve

For those looking to market themselves online, it’s important to see the forest for the trees — either start expanding your web presence or watch yourself become increasingly less visible.  Caffeine is another piece of writing on the wall.

Antiquated web strategy that centers on old-school SEO, where the object is to have your one, static website appear highly in Google for a handful of high-value key phrases, is going extinct slowly but surely.

Instead, having a dynamic presence across the web using a variety of channels is becoming what search engines are favoring, and so should you.  In fact, perhaps the largest benefit of diversifying your online presence is not that it will please search engines, but make you less dependent on them.