Avvo Board Member Brad Silverberg forwarded me this post today, and it is certainly interesting. SEO - specifically Google SEO - is turning the search/content industry on its head these days, and Alex Bosworth even argues that it is destroying the web. He says:

Today, everyone searches on Google. This means that you ought to be spending a lot of time thinking specifically about how to be placed highly and broadly on Google, if you would like Google to send millions of people to your site.

Unfortunately this means you need to do Search Engine Optimization. SEO is the worst thing ever invented. It’s destroying good web application development. Here’s why:

Alex forgot to mention that Google is also destroying the Yellow Pages . . .

It’s a digital age, my friends. And, yes, Google currently owns it. You can rage against the machine, but ultimately if you do not understand and optimize for it, you will let your revenue do the walking.

Mark

Many of you have noticed how the Client Review portion of our site seems slightly disconnected (you can’t sort by client ratings, you can’t filter to lawyers that have client reviews, etc…). Well, way back before we launched we made a trade off that allowed us to get our site out the door by June 5th and that trade off was to out source client reviews to a third party that specializes in “product reviews”. This third party system works great for other sites, but we’ve always wanted to have our client reviews feel a little more integrated with the rest of our site.

Well, today’s the day.

We just released a new implementation of Client Reviews that’s completely in house. Now before you say to yourself, “Whoop-de-freakin-doo! They’re writing about re-doing a feature”, let me say… “But wait, there’s more!”. We’re also adding the ability for users to respond to client reviews. So, if you’re a lawyer with a particularly scathing review, now is your chance to attach a comment to that review explaining your side of the story. We at Avvo know that sometimes people are not the best clients.

You’ll also notice that we’ve adding Client Review filtering and sorting to search results, giving the consumer a little more power in comparing attorneys. Attorneys with better and more client reviews generally rank higher in search results than those without (all else being equal).

With our previous implementation, we had a 72 hour approval turn around time on reviews. With out new implementation and process, we’re hoping to get that down to one business day or less.

No, it’s not a huge feature release, but it’s definitely something that we have not been satisfied with and it feels good to do it right.

Note: Client Reviews will continue to NOT affect the Avvo Rating. There seems to be a bit of confusion on this point, but as it stands today (and has always been) Client Ratings have no effect on the Avvo Rating. They are two completely separate (and in our mind complementary) views into the Attorney’s career.

It’s been a little over 3 weeks since Avvo has launched and I’m happy to say that our site has been up and stable throughout this period and able to handle the initial traffic spike. I would like to take this opportunity to shed some light on how we’ve built Avvo.

Avvo is built from ground up mostly using the latest open source technologies; we are primarily Ruby on Rails shop running on top LAM (Linux, Apache, MySQL).

I want to thank the communities for providing such wonderful products. Without them, we could not build our site as quickly and effectively as we have. And of course, over time, we will contribute to the communities and help them grow.

Cheers!
Sendi Widjaja, VP of Development

I’m a daily reader of John Cook’s venture blog over at the Seattle PI. One of the recent posts details how a reader,
Marcelo Calbucci of Sampa, ranked all Seattle Web 2.0 startups by Alexa ranking. I thought this was fascinating so I wrote a version that updates daily.

The script looks for companies which have enough traffic to get an Alexa ranking. The “Alexa 30d” column is a rolling 30 day average of that ranking. The “change” columns reflect the changes from the last time the page was updated. Since this page will update daily, the columns effectively mean “change from the day before.”

Feel free to bookmark this page to check up on how Avvo and other Seattle companies are growing on a daily basis! And if I missed a company (that is a startup in Seattle with enough traffic to get an Alexa rank), please leave me a comment and I’ll add it when I get a chance.

- Justin, Avvo Development Team

On a lighter note…

I would like to personally thank PhoCyclo for making this site possible. Without this restaurant there is absolutely no way we could have had enough sodium… err phở in our systems to get this thing out the door.

I tip my hat to you, PhoCyclo.