This week FindLaw’s page rank was knocked from Page Rank 7 to Page Rank 5 that is two orders of magnitude. Theoretically this a punishment for Findlaw abusing page rank and selling links from high ranked pages for large sums of money. This has been standard policy of Google for sometime. Google wants page rank to be a measure of authority not cash.
Although this sounds like a big hit to find law it does not appear to be affecting there search results.
the reduction (PR7 to PR5) is for the visible PageRank displayed in the Google Toolbar. Does it effect the actual rankings? As of today, in Canada, when you search for ‘find lawyer‘, I’m getting FindLaw as the No. 1 result. I repeated the search over the phone with a US client, and FindLaw was No. 2. If Google had hit FindLaw with a true penalty, those results wouldn’t be happening. – Steven Mathews.
I received similar results for “case law” keyword searches FindLaw kept coming up as the top result. I admit it is nice to see Alt Law at rank 6 and FindLaw at rank 5, but it appears to mean nothing in actual search results. If Google is going to take action they should take action that affects actual search results.
Links:
FindLaw Selling PageRank by Steve Matthews
Remove your Links from FindLaw
Alternative:
Altlaw.org
PS The absence of a link to FindLaw in this post was entirely intentional.
