It is likely that you usually read about all the things you can do to improve your legal website and make it stand out from all the rest. However, there are things that we do without thinking too much about them, which can really hurt our website. Remember that one of the factors responsible for the traffic your legal website attracts is the inbound link profile to your particular site. If you make substantial changes to your website, you have to consider whether or not those links are still valid. While the search engine can’t necessarily determine whether the links are still valid, what they can do is reduce the effective value of the inbound links until they see if people are removing your links after changes to your website. If you want to keep the ranking of your law firm website stable, then you should think about the following issues, especially if you have recently implemented or are contemplating changes.
Watch Out For Duplicate Content
Having duplicate content on your website can seriously destroy your search engine ranking position. If you’re wondering what constitutes duplicate content, this basically means having the same content on two or more pages of your website. You may have even done this deliberately in an attempt to reiterate or emphasize certain aspects of your law firm’s specialty, but be aware that Google is not a fan of duplicate content. Keeping archive pages on your site can also fall under duplicate content unless they are indexed through your robot.txt. You could also write custom summaries of your legal articles rather than posting the entire post on the main page.
Domain Change
If you have started out your website using a .net, and are now able to obtain a .com variant of your domain, you may think this is a good thing, but beware of making this type of change, as it will be seen as a huge change by search engines, especially if you also add in a website re-design. While change can be good, this is one you need to be very cautious of. Should you implement a relatively simple domain change, the search engines may believe that people who linked to your old domain will no longer link to your new domain. Even if you properly implement a 301 redirect, you may still have significant setbacks in your website traffic. Even if you have only implemented a new content management system, it may still take weeks or months for search engines to “get it”, leaving your legal website being vulnerable and somewhat devalued.
Theme Changes
If your legal firm currently specializes in personal liability, but is branching out into family law as well, it will take time for the family law section to receive the trust and authority conveyed by the current inbound links, and the value of the personal liability links may also end up being devalued. A theme change may seem obvious to we humans, but to search engines, even adding a significant amount of content to pages that previously had only a directory of links can be seen as a significant theme change. Be careful when implementing major theme changes to your law firm’s website unless you are prepared to be bumped back a few spaces and scratch your way back up to the top.
Appearing to Change Owners
Search engines relate the way one website links to another to trust in the owner, therefore the question begs, “if the owner changes, is the trust still there?” Many times the search engine may offer a resounding “no” to that question. If you have only changed the e-mail address of the administrative contact it will not likely be seen as a major change or violation of trust, especially if you are not making other significant changes at the same time. However, changing the name or address of the registrant is likely to be interpreted by search engines as a change in owner, so avoid making major changes to your legal website and a change to registrant name or address at all costs. If you must change the registrant, do it as a standalone, then wait before making any other changes.
The main principle you must remember is that search engines use algorithms to make their complex determinations when deciding who gets ranked highest, and algorithms are still not quite as smart as a real human being at figuring out exactly what a material change consists of.
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Tags: law firm seo, law firm website seo
