Posts Tagged ‘content writing scams’
Sigh. Another attorney marketing scam. Legal content writing scams and ripoffs.
While doing some research on a new client who complained his website was not showing up in search engines, I started where I often start: I looked at his SEO and his content.
What I discovered in a casual comparison of this attorney’s site to other similar sites stunned me. And, I am hard to stun because over the years I have seen some pretty blatant scams.
Attorney Marketing Firm Sells Attorneys Identical Content (worse, some is undeniable acts of plagiarism)
Open the following websites side-by-side.
Now, read and compare content for spinal cord injuries, dog bites, and personal injury overviews. All these websites were created by (and run by) the same attorney marketing firm (and not one that is small potatoes you never heard of, either.)
Let’s visit one more just for emphasis:
- Hoffman, Moore & Perez (check out their spinal cord injury page – it will look familiar if you visited any of the above listed websites)
From a search engine standpoint, aside from the firm name and address, these sites are the same.
But wait, it gets better.
The “original” content that appears for spinal cord injuries on all these attorney websites (and who knows how many others) was material taken word-for-word from the National Spinal Cord Injury Association (NSCIA). Please, do note, no credit is given to the nonprofit organization that actually wrote it on any of these websites.
If you Google “what is a spinal cord injury?” or “spinal cord injury research,” both of which are likely searches for someone suffering an SCI, the NSCIA appears in Google’s page one results.
Let’s assume a consumer clicks on a link to the NSCIA website looking for information and reads their FAQs about SCI. Maybe the consumer then searches for an attorney. How does it make an attorney look if their website repeats the same information without even offering a source credit to the noble nonprofit?
Will this misuse of duplicate content get your website penalized? It is possible because all these websites have one website (the attorney marketing firm) in common. If they all stood alone it might not be as bad. But Google is smart enough to tell fake from real when it comes to content management warehouses that generate content from data bases to toss up websites
The real issue is that if you paid good money for content writing services and got the same site that was already sold to other attorneys (and maybe even to attorneys in your own geographic location) you got ripped off.
Visit any of the websites above and look at their footer if you want to see the attorney marketing firm engaging in this practice.
