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.

Click the link to go download SEO Toolbar

Aaron Wall, writer of SEOBook, is one of my favorite people to read.  His blog, SEOBook Blog, is filled with great information about search engine optimization.  He’s a leader in his field, and on top of that, a very good writer who makes the subject very interesting.  Today I have a new reason to rave about Mr. Wall.  He has released a new SEO Tool for Firefox, called SEO Toolbar.

SEO Toolbar takes many features from older SEO Book tools, and incorporates them into a brand new consolidated toolbar for Firefox.  I am a daily user of SEO for Firefox, which is included.  Also included is an updated version of Rankchecker for Firefox.  However, merely including already-powerful tools is not enough.  Aaron Wall has improved the core functionality of SEO for Firefox.  I will definitely use the ability to cross-compare sites in Firefox, and relish the ability to export it to Excel CSV.  These tools will allow my day-to-day SEO campaigns to be put under even closer scrutiny.  Stuff I don’t use as much (yet!) has been included, such as RSS feed of popular SEO blogs, an SEO dictionary, competitive research tools, Google SK Tool integration, and more.

Lastly, the software is completely free!  No hassle-ware or other widgets begging me to hand my credit card to the publisher.  It’s truly a great asset to the community, much like its creator.