A single negative review online can cost 9% of your revenues if it's prominently placed, according to studies.  The internet's memory is forever.  If someone says something bad about your law firm even once and posts it online, it can appear in people's search results about your law firm for weeks, months, or even years.  Managing your online reputation is the key to avoiding having any unwanted links on the first several pages of search results.  In this guide, we'll discuss several online reputation management tools that are specifically designed to help you keep yourself looking great to the public.  You'll learn several tips for managing your online reputation, and how to take down some of the worst links about your company.

Are the Best Online Reputation Management Tools Free?

While it's true that there are free online reputation management tools available from several different companies, managing your online reputation isn't always cheap.  The price range is very wide: some of the best tools actually cost several hundred dollars for a year's license, while others have free trials or low basic rates.

When you use free online reputation management tools to manage your online reputation, you probably won't get much in the way of advanced features.  You may be able to see what links are mentioning you, but not whether the links portray you in a positive, neutral, or negative light.  Free online reputation management tools almost never offer you the option to repair your reputation through the creation of new content.

Keep in mind that managing your online reputation is extremely important.  If a few clients see a bad review or libelous content about your law firm, you could lose their business before they ever make a call, costing you thousands of dollars.  It can definitely be worth it for people in high-competition businesses, like law firms, to shell out money for great online reputation management tools.

Google: Making the Best Free Online Reputation Management Tools

Google is the undisputed king of giving away useful tools for webmasters and marketing professionals.  There are several different ways that you can start managing your online reputation with Google.  For example, you can set up Google Alerts that will notify you whenever your company is mentioned in a site that Google indexes.

Of course, in order to start managing your online reputation using Google Alerts, you'll need to know exactly what phrases and words you're looking for.  It can be tedious to use the alert system, especially if the search strings you're using also bring up results about other law firms or other people.

Monitor What People Say About Your Site: Trackur

Claiming to be “social media monitoring tools made easy,” Trackur offers a streamlined but still robust user interface while allowing you to monitor news mentions and even track the reputation of your competitors.  Trackur says that it can give you results for new mentions of your website even when the mentions are less than half an hour old—perfect for handling public relations problems or touchy legal situations.

While Trackur may be among the most comprehensive online reputation management tools in the world, it doesn't come cheap.  After a ten day free trial, the most basic package is $18 a month but doesn't let you use many of Trackur's advanced features.  The best packages cost nearly $400 per month.  Is it worth it?  That depends on how badly you want to make sure your reputation stays good, and how serious you are about really managing your online reputation.

The Snapshot: Reputation.Com

Reputation.com is another of the online reputation management tools that gives you the most information.  You can find out what new reviews about your firm say.  Unlike Trackur, this service doesn't yet support social network alerts, although the company claims that this service will be coming soon for their clients.

Reputation.com also tells you right away, with a snapshot view, whether the reviews you're receiving are positive, neutral, or negative.  Managing your online reputation is much easier when you can use this kind of birds'-eye view.

What's more, Reputation.com is one of the few online reputation management tools that will actually help you change the search rankings of negative reviews and bad publicity.  It works by managing your online reputation with tiered, high quality links to the pages you want, which push the negative pages to the bottom of searches.

Monitor Phrases Being Said About You: BrandsEye

Brandseye distinguishes itself from other online reputation management tools by using crowdsourcing to change alerts into real insights about how your business is being perceived online.  BrandsEye bases its pricing on how many distinct phrases you want to monitor.  BrandsEye is known by search engine optimization marketing professionals as one of the better designed online reputation management tools.  If you're looking for a tool that can automate a great deal of the day to day management of your online reputation, BrandsEye may be just the ticket.

The Twitter Specialist: TweetBeep

If you are only interested in managing your online reputation with a single social network, you might want to make it Twitter, which is very influential in search results.  TweetBeep gives you very specific functionalities for managing your online reputation on Twitter, but keep in mind that if you want more social media monitoring, you'll need to use another tool.  For most attorneys, TweetBeep won't be the best of these management tools, but a practice with a very popular Twitter feed might like the features.

Managing Your Online Reputation: Changing the Buzz Manually

Of course, you don't necessarily need to use any online reputation management tools to manage your online reputation.  The best cure for bad publicity is good publicity, and one of the best ways to manage your online reputation is to create positive buzz about your company.  Whether it's by asking your loyal clients for positive reviews or creating new press releases, you can often turn around the effects of negative reviews by simply posting more content of your own.

“How can I protect my reputation online?” is one of the biggest questions many businesses have today.  You've worked hard to build a good reputation in your community and on the internet.  But a single failure to protect the online reputation of your firm can hurt your total revenue by almost 10 percent—even if it was a negative review posted by your rivals in an attempt to drive you out of business.  It's important to protect the online reputation of your law firm, and to do that, you'll need a primer.  In this guide, you'll learn how to protect your online reputation with simple, easy to use tips.

How to Protect My Reputation Online: Avoid Unnatural Links

Being a spammer is one of the worst online reputations that you can have.  To protect the online reputation of your law firm, you need to project an image of an authoritative, professional business with quality content.  If you've used any kind of unnatural link building in the past, you should check those links in order to protect your online reputation.

If you find links that look spammy, you need to ask to have them removed to protect the online reputation of your firm.  “How does that protect my reputation online?” you may ask.  The answer is simple: if people searching for your website find that site first—or at all—they may not feel like you're a trustworthy enough law firm to do business with.

Unnatural links are being cracked down upon by Google anyhow, so you'll not only protect your online reputation when you do this—you'll also protect your search engine rankings.

How to Protect My Reputation Online: Use Social Networks

If you want to protect the online reputation of a law firm in 2012 or 2013, one of the first things you need to do is get social networking accounts on every major social network.  How does that protect my reputation online?  Because if you don't do this, it will be much harder to protect your online reputation on these sites, or even see if people are talking about you.

Social networks can also be a great way to protect your online reputation by getting out the call to people you know and trust.  If you're a small law firm and your competition has recently launched a black hat campaign to give you bad reviews, you can put a call out on Facebook and Twitter: “Help me protect my reputation online—give me a good review if you've had a good experience.”  This can net you big numbers of reviews from your best clients.

Because social networking links tend to be displayed relatively early in search results, you can also create content on social networks to protect the online reputation of your law firm.  This content can protect your online reputation by pushing the content you don't want people to see off the front page and into the rankings nobody reads.

How to Protect My Reputation Online: Monitor What People Say

To protect your online reputation, you may want to enlist help.  There are many different online tools that help to protect the online reputation of businesses.  Some of these reputation management software packages are totally free—like the alert system offered by Google—but those with more advanced functions, like automation of changes to your search rankings, can cost thousands of dollars every year you use them to protect your online reputation.

Whether you choose to start with a more streamlined free tool or a more comprehensive paid tool to protect the online reputation of your law firm, you should monitor your online reputation at least once every week.  This helps you get a feel for the trends affecting your reputation, as well as manage a new negative review quickly before it's been able to get much traction with other users online.

How to Protect My Reputation Online: Build Links Slowly

Your reputation online isn't just being measured by individual people.  Search engines like Google are also keeping track of your link presence, and in some cases you'll need to be careful to protect the online reputation of your law firm.  If Google decides that your website has been optimized too much for search engine performance, there's a chance that you'll see a major rankings penalty.

“But how can I protect my online reputation while building links?” may be your next question.  Protect your online reputation by knowing what natural links look like.  The biggest sign that a website is building its link popularity artificially is that links appear by the thousands on some days, while on other days no new links are made to your site.  That's not the pattern that websites building their link presence naturally have—they build links much more steadily, with smaller spikes when new content is created or shared.  You can protect the

How to Protect My Reputation Online: Avoid Security Breaches

This may sound like it goes without saying, but you can't protect the online reputation of your firm if you're not protecting your own website.  Using insecure passwords and outdated software on your website could leave you vulnerable to hacking attempts and denial of service attacks, and these can compromise your online reputation for months or years to come if you're not careful.  

What's more, if you keep private client information connected to your website in any way, hacking attempts could breach your security and steal that client information—any lawyer's worst nightmare.  If you're not sure how secure you really are, you may want to consult with an IT security professional to make sure that your website is safe and protect your online reputation.

How to Protect My Reputation Online: Don't Astroturf

To protect the online reputation of your law firm, you can't astroturf, making fake reviews or websites to defame a client or promote yourself.  You may think this is a way to protect your online reputation, but it's almost always too obvious and discovered very quickly.  Protect the online reputation you've built with natural methods, not by pretending to be someone you're not.  If you try to protect your online reputation with astroturfing, your state bar association may be very unhappy—and trying to excuse it by saying “I was just trying to protect my reputation online” won't cut it.

Millions of websites today are working on building an artificial link presence that isn't really based on quality content and fair play.  Instead, they're gaming the system and creating an artificial link structure designed explicitly to rocket them to the top of the search rankings.  However, every time you create an artificial link, you're leaving a trail that search engines may be able to detect.  In this guide, we'll take a look at how Google detects when law firms are using an artificial link structure.  You can use this information either to make an artificial link that looks natural, or—hopefully—to make a decision not to use artificial links as part of your search engine optimization strategy.

What's the Difference Between Natural and Artificial Links?

Natural links come about because of natural processes.  Anyone who links to your website because they know you in person, saw your link on a social media site, or just loved one of your blog entries is creating a natural link.

An artificial link is very different.  Artificial links are designed with search engine optimization as their biggest—and often sole—priority.  People tend to build these links by using automated link creation programs.  These link creation programs make for a very detectable artificial link structure, and Google and other search engine companies monitor the development of artificial link creation software heavily.  If you are believed to be engaged in creating artificial links, Google reserves the right to penalize your website by making it appear much later in search rankings.

If you're caught buying links, you can expect to be penalized for this method of artificial link building.  If you're caught selling them, though, expect your future to be even bleaker: Google is known to completely de-list websites caught creating artificial link structure for other sites.

Signs of an Artificial Link Structure: Bursts of Activity

One of the easiest ways to make sure that any artificial link creation you do remains undetected by Google is to make links relatively slowly.  Unless a website becomes a real viral sensation overnight, complete with traffic patterns that reflect virality, it's very unlikely that it will get one huge burst of links and then have barely any inbound links created for a month.

The only time that kind of pattern occurs is when an artificial link structure is being built.  This is a top sign of artificial link creation and remains the most common way that Google identifies websites using black hat techniques for search engine optimization.

Signs of an Artificial Link Structure: Identical Anchor Text

Because exact keyword match anchor text can make a bigger difference to your search rankings, some people make every artificial link they build have the same exact keyword anchor text.  But think about it: do websites that are creating links naturally use this kind of linking often?  Natural links might have anchor text like “over here” or “this” or “my favorite law firm,” rather than a specific keyword match that you designed for maximum search engine optimization.

Anyone trying to make an artificial link structure while avoiding detection needs to be careful to vary their anchor text substantially from link to link.  Yes, this will take longer—but it will also prevent your artificial link building from being noticed by Google.

Signs of an Artificial Link Structure: Links from the Same IP

When artificial link building programs put your links on many different websites, some of these programs can make a huge mistake.  If Google detects that too many of your links come from the same IP address, there's only one reasonable explanation: your artificial link building program is hosting your links on many websites that are all hosted on the same servers.

You should run an inbound link checker periodically to look for this sign of an artificial link structure, especially if you are using any kind of automated link building program.  If you see many, many links that all come from wildly different URLs but the same IP address, you need to talk to the people building your links about having some of them removed or changed.

Signs of an Artificial Link Structure: Too Many Reciprocal Links

Automated link exchange schemes were one of the biggest ways to create an artificial link presence on the web in the mid '00s.  Today, though, if you have too many reciprocal links, Google will assume that you're building them artificially, and can penalize you with its new detection algorithm, Google Penguin.

Instead, you should focus on building one way links for the most part.  Having a number of reciprocal links isn't necessarily bad, as long as they're built naturally and don't reflect your entire link presence online.  Just try to keep them a fairly small percentage of your overall links, and you should be fine.

Signs of an Artificial Link Structure: Poor Quality Links

If your links all come from blogs with bizarre, garbled entries and no comment moderation, it's very unlikely that Google is going to consider these links helpful to your search rankings.  You should try to build links from websites that have a relatively high Google PageRank, indicating that they have attained a level of high popularity and authority with Google users.

Signs of an Artificial Link Structure: Content Spinner Sites

One of the easiest ways for lawyers to build an artificial link presence a few years ago was to use so-called “article spinners” that posted the same article content in many different places all over the web.  However, these websites were easy to identify: they accepted any press release or article submission, and explicitly worked to create inbound links on other sites.

If you used one of these websites, an update called Google Panda likely negated the value of all of your link building there.  Google identified the top offenders and made their links worthless, so that now it's a very bad idea to waste your time with the same kinds of content spinner websites.  Get your content to spread naturally and virally, not artificially with automated programs.

If you're planning to improve your search engine optimization in 2013, you may want to become one of the over 50 percent of small law firms that maintains a blog.  Blogs are one of the best ways to increase your website readership quickly and to generate the inbound links that are the foundation of all contemporary SEO strategies.  One of the ways that you can generate inbound links with your blog is through blog link exchange.  While many types of link exchange are actually considered harmful for websites, there are ways to do blog link exchange right.  In this guide you'll find out how to link exchange with blog owners in a way that won't lead to penalties or regrets.

The Problem With Traditional Link Exchange

Link exchange has been one of the foundational principles of getting inbound links ever since search engines started using links to determine rankings.  However, as people got wise to the ways that search engines were creating their rankings lists, they started to game the system.  Some clever people working in search engine optimization realized that any time people created reciprocal links, both of them were getting “link juice,” or authority, that helped drive their rankings up.

Their solution was to automate link exchange.  Soon, blog link exchange was no longer a matter of finding other people with relevant interests—it was just about inserting a piece of code onto your website and watching the links roll in without your input or even necessarily your knowledge.  Instead of showing which websites you were actually interested in, this kind of automated link exchange with blog owners just led to sites filled with reciprocal link spam.

What's So Different About Ethical Blog Link Exchange?

Blog link exchange doesn't have to look like that.  Lawyers are in a unique position in terms of link exchange with blog owners.  Why?  Because law blogs are about very interesting events and news topics, and because many different law blogs have various subject matter intersection points.  This is a perfect environment to start link exchange for blog SEO.

When you do ethical blog link exchange, you're not doing a link exchange for blog optimization exclusively.  You're also doing it because you believe that your blog readers will be interested in what the writer of the other blog has to say.  Blog link exchange of this type will usually mean that the vast majority of blogs you have reciprocal links with are also about law, perhaps even about the same specialty of law that you're practicing and writing about.

How To Do Blog Link Exchange Right

If you want to link exchange with blog owners, you're going to need to get to know them first.  That means beginning to read law blogs.  Blog link exchange will only be ethical if you're picking places to exchange links based on the actual content and quality of the blogs in question.

When you decide that you want to link exchange your blog, you can send a brief but not generic email to the person who runs the blog you want to link to.  Ask them if they might be interested in doing a blog link exchange with you.  If they aren't interested, don't try to force the issue—there are plenty of other places to do link exchange with blog owners.  Usually, it will be much easier to get someone to agree to a blog link exchange if you've already commented on their posts and interacted with them once or twice, or if they already read and comment on your blog.

Instead of just doing a link exchange with blog owners, you may want to exchange the links through mutual guest posts.  By guest posting on someone else's blog and allowing them to guest blog on yours, you're not only generating blog link exchange, you're also making sure that your readers hear about another blog that you find interesting and worthwhile.

If you wouldn't want someone to guest post on your blog, you may want to reconsider the reasons that you want to do a blog link exchange with them.  Link exchange with blog owners is really only advisable when you're exchanging links with people you actually respect and want to read.

How To Do Blog Link Exchange Wrong

Usually, doing the wrong kind of link exchange with blog owners will involve sending mass emails to bloggers, requesting mutual links.  If you find yourself spamming dozens of bloggers in a single night, you can safely assume that you're doing blog link exchange wrong.  Not only is this an unethical way to do link exchange with blog owners, it's also very likely to lead to Google penalties.

The worst way to do blog link exchange is to try to get exchange with very low quality blogs or blogs that have little or nothing to do with the law or your practice area.  This is generally seen as a sign of desperation and won't look good on your blog when potential clients see it.

Use Caution: Don't Use All Links From Blog Link Exchange

Even if you're doing a great job and have managed to do link exchange with blog owners all over the country, it's not a good idea to have the majority of your links come from blog link exchange.  Why?  Because Google tends to assume that anyone with too many reciprocal links is actually using the unethical methods of link exchange.

You should try to keep your overall number of links made through link exchange with blog owners to a small percentage of your total inbound links.  If you do this, Google won't identify your behavior as potential evidence of over optimization, and you're much less likely to incur any penalties for your linking preferences.

Consider adding to your links from social networking websites, social bookmarking hubs, and directories in order to establish a pattern of developing one way links as well as reciprocal links.
 

As a lawyer, you're very familiar with the idea that when something looks too good to be true, it probably is.  You may have seen search engine marketers who talked about free link exchanges for attorneys, and you may be wondering whether a free link exchange could be the SEO answer you've been looking for.  Unfortunately for lawyers, using free link exchanges is usually a bad idea and will almost never give you a net positive result for your search rankings.  In this guide, you'll find out why free link exchange used to work—but also why today, it's a losing game.

What is a Free Link Exchange?

Free link exchanges exist because of the way that Google computes whose website is listed where in search rankings.  Because Google's search spiders aren't being assisted by humans who can tell them exactly which websites appear to be high quality and which are low quality, Google has to take some shortcuts.  One of the ways that Google tells whose website is better and more authoritative is by seeing how many different links there are to that website.

If a website has a huge number of inbound links, it's obvious that a large number of people respect—or at least are interested in—that website.  This means that Google will put it higher into the rankings.  Free link exchanges developed because website owners realized that, at least initially, Google didn't make much distinction between different types of inbound links.  When all links were valued similarly to each other, free link exchange was an idea that made sense and worked to lift many websites into the top page of search results.

Do Free Link Exchanges Really Work?

While it's true that free link exchange was a good idea several years ago, there are a few reasons that it doesn't work very well today.  Free link exchanges were identified by Google as being rife with abuse and inorganic link building.  Remember, the whole idea behind using inbound links in the rankings algorithm was to make sure that people could see the highest quality links first.  Now, with people gaming the search engines, low quality links created by free link exchanges were suddenly at the top of the heap.

Google didn't like this very much, and responded by figuring out some algorithmic ways to detect when free link exchange was being used in place of organic link building.  For example, when Google detects that you have a very high percentage of links coming from known link exchange websites, you may now incur penalties to your rankings so that those links are now completely without value.  

Can a Free Link Exchange Ever Help?

It is sometimes possible to do free link exchanges that will make your website rise in search rank.  However, you're not going to be able to just do free link exchange in huge, wholesale quantities.  Instead, keep your free link exchanges personal: try exchanging links with some bloggers or other attorneys that you know, and bring in some reciprocal links in this way.  You won't be penalized for a small number of reciprocal links, and this kind of linking is a good way to contextualize your blog and help it become indexed properly.

Why Do People Still Promote Free Link Exchanges?

Some attorneys are surprised to learn that free link exchange no longer works.  After all, if you search the web for information about link exchange, you'll find tips and hints about it on many websites.  However, you need to keep a couple of things in mind when seeing free link exchanges promoted online.  

First of all, many of the websites offering free link exchanges still want to promote themselves.  If you want to get unbiased advice, you can't get it from someone who has a stake in making sure you're using link exchange.  Second, many of the articles that are positive about link exchange were actually written several years ago, when free link exchanges were still potentially a good search engine optimization strategy.  The landscape of the web changes so quickly that you really shouldn't trust any marketing information that is even a few years old.

Help, I'm Being Penalized for my Free Link Exchange!

Some people don't find out that Google penalizes free link exchanges until their webmaster gets an email from the search engine.  If Google believes you've been using link exchange websites too much, you'll receive notification that your website is over optimized and contains suspicious links.  You'll be given an opportunity to have the links deleted in order to stop the penalties from occurring.

To get the links taken down, start by running a free inbound link checker tool.  You'll find out which websites are currently hosting links to yours, and can begin the process of emailing each webmaster.  This can be long and tedious, and it's possible that some or all of the webmasters you contact will be unavailable or unwilling to take down the links.  If this happens, you should alert Google and show them the paper trail you've built, indicating that you made a good faith effort to have the link taken down.

Will Free Link Exchanges Become Popular Again?

Occasionally, you'll see someone talking about a new system for creating free link exchange that is supposed to work better.  Sometimes these involve link exchanges only for sites with high PageRank values, or exchanging links in an automated way but only with contextually similar sites.  The truth is, all of these methods are still relatively indiscriminate, and are likely to be perceived as deliberate attempts to overoptimize your website.

Don't count on free link exchanges ever regaining their popularity.  If they do, it will only be because they've truly become “intelligent” link exchanges that only work to link websites that truly have common features and would have good potential for reader crossover.  Until this happens, it appears that like keyword stuffing and article spinners, free link exchanges have gone onto the trash heap of SEO ideas that used to work.

So you're considering link exchanges as part of your web strategy, perhaps because of reading an internet article about how when you exchange links, your search engine rankings go up.  When 90 percent of web searchers don't ever click through to the second page of search results, it's obviously critical to maintain great rankings.  But is link exchange the way to do it?  In this guide, you'll learn the basics of why and how people exchange links for search engine optimization purposes, and why link exchanges have been forced to change and even shut down due to new developments in search engine technology.

Why Do People Exchange Links?

Usually, when more people are linking to a website, it's a very good indicator that they believe it to be trustworthy and authoritative.  More people link to a prestigious, well known law blog like The Volokh Conspiracy than link to a relatively unknown law blog run by a personal injury solo practitioner in Ames, Iowa, and Google took notice of this kind of pattern.  It started awarding higher search rankings to websites that could show a large number of inbound links that were indexed by Google.

As people realized that the number of inbound links they had was critical—even more so than keyword density—to search rankings, they started developing strategies for deliberate link building.  However, it can be difficult to get links put up on websites by hand—it takes a little bit of time, and what are you giving back for it?  Since Google actively discourages the buying and selling of links (to the point of completely de-listing known link selling operations from searches), people came up with an ingenious idea: link exchange.

Link exchanges seemed like a win-win situation in the beginning.  Now, anyone could get as many links as they wanted.  It became even easier to exchange links when clever programmers began automating the process.  Automated link exchange, though, changed the game a bit.  Anyone—even a terrible spammer—could use link exchanges and suddenly have prominent search results.  This wasn't the result Google wanted to encourage, so it started using some policies to regulate how people exchange links.

Is it a Good Idea to Exchange Links?

Today, using link exchange is actually of very limited utility.  You can still use link exchanges on the web, but most of these no longer really work.  If you pass a threshold percentage for reciprocal (exchanged) links, Google will simply no longer count the additional “link juice” of more reciprocated links, no matter how many thousands of links you're building.

This means that more than anything, it's a big waste of time today to exchange links on an industrial scale.  You'd be much better off focusing on organic link building efforts and improving your content for people to link to.

Can I Still Do Link Exchange With Friends or Colleagues?

The one exception to the “link exchanges are now useless” rule is when you're reciprocating links with people you actually know personally.  Linking to other professionals and getting them to link to you is a good way to build your network of connections.  However, doing this type of link exchange isn't really geared toward getting you amazing search engine optimization results directly.  Instead, it's designed to make sure that you are connecting to more people who will then, in turn, want to supply you with much-needed organic, contextual one way links.

These links are much more valuable to you than the single tiny drop of link juice they initially give you.  If you're able to make your content go viral, it'll be much easier to get people to your blog or main firm website.

Analyzing Your Link Exchange Numbers

If you want to make sure that you're not using too many link exchanges, you may want to run a link checker that examines your backlinks and gives you a report about how many of your links are reciprocal versus one way.  If you find that a very large number of your links are from reciprocal link exchange, you have two different ways that you can fix it.

The first is to ask for some of your links to be removed.  Inform webmasters that you no longer wish to exchange links with them and are changing your search engine optimization strategy.  Even if they refuse, Google will generally accept proof of your good faith effort as sufficient reason to turn the link juice faucet back on for you.

The other way that you can reduce your percentage of link exchanges is, of course, to increase the number of one way links going to your website.  If you use this strategy, use extreme caution: increasing your one way inbound links too quickly can attract negative Google attention just as fast as overuse of link exchanges.

Finding Alternatives to Link Exchange

Once you start to exchange links as your primary search engine optimization method, it can be tough to find an alternative.  Instead of using a link exchange, you should consider focusing your search engine marketing on the biggest trends for contemporary websites.  Social networks like Twitter and Facebook have come to dominate much of the internet, and you will get a lot more link juice from using these websites appropriately than you will from an exchange of links.

Another way to make your SEO better without having to exchange links: social bookmarking sites.  These sites allow people to socially share, rather than exchange, links that they find interesting and relevant.  Anyone can post a link to these websites, and they are quickly taking on the role that link exchanges used to play.

Possible Penalties for Link Exchange

If you decide to persist in the exchange of links even after you are penalized by Google, several things may happen.  In most cases, Google will simply not allow you to generate more link juice, which will cause you to slowly slide down the rankings ladder.  However, if you're clearly abusing link exchanges, the links could actually start having a negative value.  It's better not to risk it.  It's no longer enough to just exchange links—and trying to exchange them is so unlikely to help that it's hard to see any value in doing it.
 

It can be really hard to get a straight answer today about what works and what doesn't work in search engine marketing.  So many different companies have a piece of software to sell that reliable information about link exchange, inbound linking, and reciprocal linking is incredibly difficult to come by.  Let's say you're considering using reciprocal link exchange services.  You can't ask a reciprocal link exchange service whether reciprocal links are still a good strategy—their business model depends on telling you “yes.”  This guide will give you unbiased, up to date information about whether it's a good idea to use reciprocal link exchange services in 2012 and 2013.

What is a Reciprocal Link Exchange Service?

Reciprocal linking refers to the “you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours” notion of trading links for mutual search engine optimization benefit.  Reciprocal link exchange services were some of the hottest properties for people wanting to do search engine marketing in 2005 to 2007.  However, they have recently declined in popularity, for reasons we'll get to in just a few minutes.

A reciprocal link exchange service works by automating some of the process to automate links.  Generally, the way that reciprocal link exchange services work is by having you put a small piece of code into the HTML of your website.  When that piece of code is used, it gives other people a way to automatically generate a reciprocal link to you.  A reciprocal link exchange service can sometimes be a way to generate dozens or hundreds of inbound links in a very short amount of time, which is why these services became so well loved by search engine marketing professionals.

How Do Lawyers Use a Reciprocal Link Exchange Service?

Some attorneys used reciprocal link exchange services a bit differently.  Instead of just using a reciprocal link exchange service that allowed for any links to be exchanged, some lawyers chose to do link exchanges only with other lawyers.  However, this still allowed links to be made that were automated and with low quality control.

The reason that attorneys used this strategy was to make their rankings rise higher.  With a higher number of inbound links, especially from contextually related websites, Google tends to assume that a site is trustworthy and should be included among the top results for a search string.

When lawyers were using reciprocal link exchange services, they were trading quality SEO for quantities of inbound links.  A reciprocal link exchange service could never generate the same level of link quality that you would get from carefully building links organically, but until a few years ago, there was just no reason to care.

Why Reciprocal Link Exchange Changed

In recent years, Google has gotten better at determining the quality level of an inbound link.  Now, the number of links you have from reciprocal link exchange services can actually sometimes harm your site.  That's because Google recognizes an excessive use of a reciprocal link exchange service is usually an indication of a low quality, high quantity link building strategy of a type that it likes to discourage.

Today, the amount of link juice that you'll get from additional reciprocal links dwindles to zero if you receive a high percentage of links from reciprocal link exchange services.  This means that using a reciprocal link exchange service went from being useful to being very nearly useless overnight.

What Do We Do Now?

If you were using reciprocal link exchange services before, you need to have a new strategy now.  Instead of a reciprocal link exchange service, you should be working to build effective, engaging one way links that will be of interest to real people.

Avoid any excessive automation in creating your one way links.  Placing identical links in a large number of websites will trip Google's over optimization detectors just as fast or faster than using reciprocal link exchange services.  You should strive for link diversity, which will serve you much better through any future search updates and changes.

Avoiding Penalties For Using Reciprocal Link Exchange Services

If you've already been using a reciprocal link exchange service, this article may be making you very nervous.  If you've been penalized or are worried about penalties to your search rankings from using reciprocal link exchange services, you need to take action now.  Run a backlinks checker online that can detect where your inbound links are coming from.  Then, when you find the backlinks that were generated by a reciprocal link exchange service, make a note of the URL and start emailing webmasters to have your links taken down.

Most webmasters today will be very understanding—after all, they were clearly using reciprocal link exchange services too, and may like you be learning just now about their disadvantages.  However, if a webmaster is reluctant to take down the link put up by a reciprocal link building service, the solution is easy: just take the link down from your website, and you now have a perfectly serviceable one way link.

The Future of Reciprocal Link Exchange Services

Of course, no reciprocal link exchange service wants to go down without a fight.  When reciprocal link exchange services were first made irrelevant to search engine optimization, many of them tried various tactics to stay in business.  A few are still functional today, but the truth is that the reciprocal link exchange service appears to be, for the most part, a dying breed.

What's more, it seems very unlikely that reciprocal link exchange services will make a comeback.  Reciprocal linking is just too easy to abuse for Google to ever encourage it again.  Changing your law firm's search engine marketing focus is absolutely necessary if you've been using a reciprocal link exchange service.  You can't hope that the new fads will go away and that reciprocal linking will come back—it's so unlikely to happen that it's not even worth planning for.