I’ve changed the title of this post to Class Action Legal Advertising to get around some filters focused on “light cigarettes” I seem to have encountered.

In Florida, it was recently ruled that light cigarette manufacturers are liable for misrepresenting their products as a safer alternative to traditional cigarettes. (I’m sure you’ve seen it on the news.) The class action lawsuit that’s sure to result has a pool of eligible plantiffs numbering in the millions, each with claims ranging from minor health problems to the wrongful death of a loved one.

So what’s the issue? My question: where are the buyers of light cigarette legal advertisements? Where are the PPC ads soliciting this group of potential plantiffs? In the recent Kentucky Comair crash as well as the (older) Florida tobacco ruling, there were paid ads in Google and Yahoo the morning after the decision with law firms offering sympathy and free consultations. Today, days after the light cigarette ruling, there are only one or two firms advertising for keyphrases such as “light cigarette class action” and “light cigarette lawsuit”. Is there more to this story? Let me know what you think.

Someone asked me the other day, “Just what is the Yahoo! Directory?” I culled together a few sources along with my own notes and produced this overview. Perhaps someone will find it useful!

Yahoo Directory

Launched in 1994, Yahoo is the web’s oldest “directory,” a place where human editors organize web sites into categories. However, in October 2002, Yahoo made a giant shift to crawler-based listings for its main results. This establishes two main “parts” of the Yahoo search base: crawler-based listings and directory listings.

Crawler-based listings are what most people are familiar with – when you go to www.yahoo.com and perform a search, crawler-based listings are generally what’s returned.  Crawler-based listings are not reviewed by a human. Instead, they are based upon URLs the Yahoo spider has found and ranked according to an internal algorithm.

The Yahoo Directory still survives. You’ll notice “category” links below some of the sites lists in response to a keyword search. When offered, these will take you to a list of web sites that have been reviewed and approved by a human editor.

It’s also possible to do a pure search of just the human-compiled Yahoo Directory, which is how the old or “classic” Yahoo used to work. To do this, search from the Yahoo Directory home page, as opposed to the regular Yahoo.com home page. Then you’ll get both directory category links (“Related Directory Categories”) and “Directory Results,” which are the top web site matches drawn from all categories of the Yahoo Directory.

Sites pay an annual fee to be included in the Yahoo Directory’s commercial listings, though they must meet editor approval before being accepted. Submission to the directory and payment of the fee doesn’t guarantee ranking, it only guarantees that Yahoo! will review the site.

The biggest advantage to getting listed in the the Yahoo! Directory is the link authority the directory carries. In other words, a human has manually reviewed the site and is vouching that it is of generally good quality. Because of this, the Directory is known to be an authority. Sites with authority confer authority by linking to other sites. Sites seen as an authority on a topic rank well in all search engines.

[tags]Yahoo directory,Yahoo![/tags]

Update: see Adam Lasnik’s comment below

I read an interesting post on seoblackhat.com today saying that Adam Lasnik of Google confirmed that their “link:www.mysite.com” query i) isn’t very accurate and ii) is seen as a “spammy” request by Google. In other words, people hammering Google.com with “link:www.mysite.com” are effectively revealing themselves as ~nefariously involved~ with SEO. Is this, or will this be, one of Google’s metrics for determining sites that stink of SEO?

Related question: if “link:www.mysite.com” is a no-no, how about “site:www.mysite.com”?

Relevant Resources

• Google Seminar Description by FirstGov – what the heck, I haven’t seen anyone else link to it
• Original TheGoogleCache post
• Follow-up TheGoogleCache post

[tags]spammy,link query,adam lasnik,google[/tags]

I’m pleased to announce CaseDetails.com is now WAP enabled! What’s that mean? Visitors who access the “normal” www.casedetails.com URL via cell phone, Windows CE device, BlackBerry, etc. will be redirected to an XHTML compliant version of the site where past and present posts are available for review.

Now that I’ve got this up and running here, perhaps I can pass along how easy it was so you can get your WAP enabled legal website going as well. (This temporarily bypasses the soon-to-be-addressed issue of why you should have a WAP enabled website for your firm.) This advice is for WordPress users only at this point.

In short, upload wp-wap to your site. Then add a few lines to your .htaccess file to detect and redirect mobile devices:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_ACCEPT} (x-)*(application|text)/(x-)*(vnd[-.])*(wap[-.]|wml)+
RewriteRule ^(index.php)*$ wp-wap.php [L]

That’s it! I’ll update this space in the near future with instructions for non-WordPress users.

[tags]wap enabled,legal websites,mobile devices[/tags]

There’s a new tool on the block aimed at the booming blogger market – Windows Live Writer (Beta) 1.0. In summary, it’s a desktop application that allows WYSIWYG authoring of posts by programs like WordPress, Blogger, Movable Type and more. In an interesting twist, the program also has a SDK (software developer kit) so modules can be developed for extended functionalities. (For some reason, I get a chuckle out of their homepage statement “We can’t wait to see all the things people cook up with the SDK!”)

So is it worth a try? My immediate opinion is that the workspace looks very similar to Microsoft Word, without so many buttons. Matter of fact, the workspace looks kind of sparse, but with the basics covered. In contrast to w.bloggar, I don’t see any table options. We’ll have to see what I discover as I explore a bit more.

To cover all the bases, there are also the features available for general blog management like “updating weblog style”, trackbacks and other settings. One unique feature is the ability to insert Windows Live Maps. Something I just have to try:

Insertion of the map appears to be successful. With the ability to reference “bird’s eye” views through Microsoft Virtual Earth, the maps look nice, but the accuracy is questionable.

In a sceptical streak, I do hope the program doesn’t fudge up the code like other Microsoft applications tend to do. Time to post this and see!

Thanks to Andy at The lost outpost for the heads up on this program.

[tags]Windows Live Writer[/tags]

One of my few complaints about WordPress as a blog publishing platform is that the “visual rich editor” isn’t very powerful for formatting and manipulating text and/or HTML. While you can turn off this visual editor, I recently read a WordPress book where w.bloggar was recommended as a (free) option. w.bloggar 4.0, a desktop application used to edit blogs powered by WordPress, Blogger, MovableType and more than 10 other publishing platforms, offers a GUI environment for creating and editing blog posts. Free being one of my favorite things, I decided to give it a try. Matter of fact, this post is my first using that system!

w.bloggar Review

The current install version is 4.0. Setup is very straight forward. Just download the zip or exe, run the installer and start the program. It will prompt you for whether you want a new or have an existing blog, guide you through finding the xmlrpc.php file. (This is kind of “universal translator” code interface the default WordPress install puts in your root blog folder, allowing any program to be designed to pass information to and from a blog that’s live and online.) Enter your username and password and you’re in!

FORMATTING OPTIONS – Upon initial setup, you’re presented with a basic editor interface. There are clearly-marked places to enter your post’s Title and body copy. Of course, w.bloggar provides buttons to apply boldface, italicized, strikethrough and underlined text formatting to your text, as well as buttons for bulleting, linking and aligning. Except for the underline option, this is pretty well the same as WordPress. At first glance, I’m not really impressed. I do like that the program says it will output XHTML compliant code, but using traditional HTML attributes like targets, I’m not sure it’s truly 100% compliant. I also do like that nearly every option is tied to a keyboard shortcut (macro). For example, to underline text, you just press [CTRL]+U. These shortcuts are limited within WordPress.

It does appear there are more font face and size options readily available but (honestly) CSS should be used to set most of these things. On second thought, and CSS-purism aside, this is likely to be a very powerful feature for most users considering most non-technical users wouldn’t be the ones editing the CSS themselves.

So w.bloggar formatting? Eh, it’s ok. I have a feeling a quick search of WordPress plugins would turn up something with similar capabilities, though. Continuing the exploration…

HTML OPTIONS – Now we’re talking. Non breaking spaces, H1, H2, H3, hex colors, comments and more are readily available. Moreover, there’s a table button. Since
i) I, personally, am looking into changing the way I code tables from straight HTML to CSS; and ii) the native WordPress interface doesn’t have much to offer in the way of insertion/creation of tables, I’m interested to see how this feature works out.

TOOLS – This is where a few more features are offered, both basic and advanced. Options to publish to multiple blogs, adjust templates and upload files are placed along side of simple functions like blog properties and spell check. Good features, but I’m interested to see how subsequent versions of w.bloggar will expand the more “advanced” options.

In conclusion, I’m still 50/50 on the product. If I find a few plugins that emulate w.bloggar’s “unique” properties (like tables), it may make the program less useful. Time will tell.

Related Resources:

• w.bloggar site
• About.com general WordPress info
• WordPress formatting plugins

[tags]w.bloggar,wordpress,visual rich editor[/tags]

Now that Google has caught on to reciprocal linking campaigns and even (supposedly) three-way cross linking campaigns, the importance of non-reciprocal link building has come to the forefront.  I thought I’d jot down a few ways a law firm could build one way, non reciprocal links by exploring non-traditional options. (Note: link building should be the second part of your strategy to do well in the rankings. The first part should be creation of good content that attracts visitors and creates “buzz”.)

• Post an article to an applicable Wiki. You can find one by exploring the Wikipedia itself.
• Contact your local library to see if they’ll add your firm’s site to their Internet Links section. Most will do it… and a link from a .LIB.US domain will do great things for you!
• Once a month, submit a press release to your local paper as well as the leading online PR publication sites. Sites like PRWeb.com, Businesswire.com, PRFree.com and PR.com are good places to start.
• Are you still close with your alma mater? See about getting your firm listed on any resource pages published by alumni groups or the school of law.

That’s it for now. I’m sure there are more options out there that I haven’t listed, but this is a good start!
[tags]link building,non-reciprocal links,linking strategy[/tags]

I recently read a great (series) of articles by Ben Cowgill that outline the fuzzy nature of the law when it comes to print advertising – never mind online advertising. The articles center around the recent, tragic crash of Comair flight 5191 near Lexington Kentucky. But the issue isn’t the cause of the crash or story of the victims, per se, it’s about the swarm of ads that came out in the wake of the crash.

In the same vein as a recent CaseDetails post, Cowgill explores local and national law firms’ advertisements placed shortly after the crash as well as how the Kentucky Advertising Commission is reacting to those ads. I’ll leave it to you to follow the links and read the articles in full, but the interesting thing is what Cowgill only begins to explore. Don’t get me wrong, the articles are excellent and exactly what they should be, but I’ve enjoyed pondering

1. how any commission could regulate the timing of (and levee penalties because of) search engine results appearing within any 30 day “no contact” period after a tragedy. There’s not only the issue of Google listing what it pleases, when it pleases but there’s the larger issue of the law’s non-address of the Internet as a different advertising medium than print. As a constantly-accessible medium, it simply cannot be restricted to the same kind of publish-then-consume model followed by print ads.
2. none of this even mentions paid online advertising through Overture’s system, Google AdWords and others. Now we’re talking about firms taking pro-active measures to reach out and attract clients from a tragedy. If this is against any Advertising Commission’s rules, won’t it be rather easy to scrape results and penalize accordingly? Not much ambiguity here, but very few case examples out there setting precedent.

As these matters are clarified, it will be interesting to see how lawyers are directed to conduct their legal advertising campaigns. In addition, we’ll see if any caviats are created to accommodate the Internet as both an active and passive advertising medium. We shall see.

[tags]legal advertising,comair 5191,online advertising[/tags]