Mark’s Blog

From the “bad precedent” department, lawfirm Jones Day in Chicago filed an abusive lawsuit against startup BlockShopper.  Jones Day filed the suit in an attempt to control the anchor text of links to the firm.  A settlement has been reached out of court that prohibits Blockshopper from linking to the litigious bastards using anything but URL text and “Jones Day” The story at Ars Technica is here.  

Anchor text is what shows up for a link.  For instance, my “abusive lawsuit” link above links to jonesday.com, but the “abusive lawsuit” text is referred to as the anchor text.  Anchor text is an important factor in what Google and other search engines use to calculate keywords you rank for.  For instance, if there were a ton of links with the anchor text “abusive lawsuit” pointing at jonesday.com, then jonesday.com would likely come up as the first result for “abusive lawsuit”.  This can be done in a coordinated fashion called Google-Bombing.  Famous examples include the “Miserable Failure” googlebomb aimed at the biography of George W. Bush and a similar campaign against Al Gore.  

Googlebombs can be “defused” by Google, as they have a custom algorithm that is periodically run (according to a post at Matt Cutt’s blog, it’s when they feel like it’s needed).  However, this is the first time someone has successfully sued to affect their anchor tags.  It’s a bad precedent for the web and might be a part and parcel of the SEO efforts of future large corporations trying to manage ranked keywords.  For instance, suppose someone working on Ford Motor company’s SEO team noticed that Ford Motor company had been linked to unfavorably by a website, perhaps using anchor text “broken down car” or something similarly derogatory.   With the precedent that has been set, that SEO guy/gal could fire off an email to Ford’s legal team to harass that site and convince them to change/remove their links to better reflect the trademarks and brand of Ford.  Alternatively, they could issue linking guidelines through their legal team that would aid in SEO, such as requirements to include the title of the page (containing targetted keywords, of course).

Jones Day’s lawsuit specifies exactly how BlockShopper is supposed to link to Jones Day, and actually requires that they use the name of the lawyer they are linking to (the lawsuit was over linking to attorney profiles) and Jones Day.  This would have the effect of “pairing” a lawyer’s name with Jones Day in SERPs, making it harder for the lawyer to establish a private practice.  Additionally, it prevents negative anchor text from seeding keywords to specific lawyers or Jones Day in general.  Google’s pagerank counts each link as a vote, so in essence, Jones Day is deciding how you are allowed to vote for them.  It will remain to be seen how Google reacts to this and how their algorithms change to accomodate this censorship of information.  The engineers pride themselves on being able to algorithmically filter out misleading, irrelevant, or commercial influences from their SERPs, so this should be a good test.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.