January 26th, 2011 by Conrad Saam, Marketing

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“Avvo’s link is as good as [a link from] a shoe store.” – Mark Astarita

I recently had an interesting debate on Solosez with Attorney, Mark Astarita, regarding the value of the link coming from an Avvo profile to a professional’s website.  During the discussion, it became clear to me that while people may know that “links” are important, there is limited understanding of how they impact search results.

First, some background.  The search engines use the quantity and quality of links pointing to a given website or page to determine how that page should rank.  For example, there are literally millions of pages about Divorce – search engines rely heavily on the number and quality of links pointing to any given page about Divorce when determining how well each page should rank for the search query “Divorce”.  Not all links are created equal, and while there are a myriad different factors, here are three of the most important:

• Anchor text – the words in the actual link.  Anchor text that matches a specific query helps the page rank for that query.  In this link example:  divorce, the word “divorce” is the anchor text and that link will help (although just a tiny bit) Avvo’s page for divorce to rank for queries around “divorce”.
• Quality of links – links from highly authoritative domains (like the Wall Street Journal) are more valuable than links from less authoritative domains (like www.ConradIsAwesome.com).  Domain authority is often described using the 1-10 logarithmic scale from Google called Page Rank.  Additionally, the relevance of the referring domain is important – so that a link to a doctor’s site from the American Medical Association is more valuable than a link for that doctor’s site from a shoe store (from our example above.)
• Domain Diversity – the number of different domains linking to a given page is valuable.  Simply put, 1 link on 10 different domains confers more authority than 10 links on 1 domain.

As links became so effective in helping sites rank, some SEOs started abusing opportunities to create links.  For example, blog comments became full of spammy links for Viagra and gambling.  In order to counteract this, most sites with user generated content (like Avvo) now attach a “no follow” command to links.  This command tells the search engines to remove the SEO value of that link.  While almost all of the Avvo links have this no follow command, the link to a lawyer’s website doesn’t and therefore provides SEO value.

If you’d like a cursory review of how your site performs from a link perspective, you can use a tool from seomoz called Open Site Explorer which highlights anchor text, link quality and domain diversity in their reporting.  (You’ll get limited data with their free access.)  The free results for Avvo’s homepage are below.

What this means for a lawyer or doctor’s website:

The link from your profile on Avvo can really boost your site’s SEO authority.  While you can’t customize the anchor text, you do increase your site’s authority by getting a link from a highly authoritative (high Page Rank) and highly relevant (Avvo is focused exclusively on legal and medical content) website.  This is particularly valuable for a recently created professional website that has a very limited domain diversity profile.  Additionally, if you are a large law firm or hospital Avvo can generate hundreds or even thousands of links to your site, one from each of your professionals’ profile page, albeit from the same domain.

You can learn more about domain diversity in the following great articles:

• Domain Diversity Key Metric for High Search Engine Rankings (great description of the theory from Natural Search Blog)
• Get the Domain Diversity You Want (from SEOmoz)
• Link Valuation Domain Diversity (from Law Firm SEO Blog by Gyi Tsakalakis)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 26th, 2011 at 1:43 pm by Conrad Saam, Marketing and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.