Spam Comments Aimed at Boosting Lawyers' Sites

(Eugene Volokh)

I've recently seen a couple of cases in which someone seems to be promoting lawyers' Web sites using spam blog comments. Here's a sample of the most recent incident (with the name of the lawyer blanked out, because he assured me that he told his SEO company to stop doing this):

Aattorney

electricalexamanswers@gmail.com

27.0.111.218

Submitted on 2012/01/14 at 2:41pm

Hi Todd Zywicki,

Mr __ __ like like as attorney cleveland tn.

He is also a law blogger.After he visited your site.He explained some great news from your site.

thanks....

Aattorney

__.__123@gmail.com

27.0.111.218

Submitted on 2012/01/12 at 8:31am

Thank you for your great article.

attorney cleveland tn

cleveland tn attorneys

attorneys in cleveland tn

us attorney cleveland

lawyers in cleveland tn

The first comment included one link to a page on the lawyer's blog; the second included five such links. When this sort of thing happened (on two occasions, involving two different lawyers), I got in touch with the lawyers, who reported that (1) they had hired some company to get their sites better placed in search engine results, and (2) now that they had learned what the company had done, they were telling the companies to stop doing it (or stopped working with the companies altogether) — understandable, since this sort of thing is a good way to get unfavorable attention online rather than favorable attention.

In any case, I think this might be a helpful alert to lawyers who are hiring someone to try to promote their sites: It's possible that the promotion might consist of behavior that is par for the course for purported penis enlargement products, but not really in keeping with the sort of reputation that lawyers generally seek to cultivate.