Backlinks are links from other websites that point to yours. Many describe them as votes of confidence in your website’s quality.
The more authoritative the website linking to you, the better. That’s because backlinks aren’t just sending visitors to your website, they’re passing authority (some call this “link juice”). If you’re a law firm, a link from the American Bar Association’s website to yours is very valuable, a strong endorsement from a highly respected authority. A good deal of link juice, in other words.
Traditionally, the more votes you get from high-authority sources, the better your content must be, and the more likely Google is to rank your page highly.
At least, that’s been the idea. Some feel backlinks don’t carry as much weight these days. Others still swear by them as a crucial pillar of law firm SEO.
The key? Build a backlink profile that’s natural and relevant to your law firm. Do that, and no matter how Google updates its algorithm, you’ll be linkbuilding in the spirit of what made backlinks foundational to the very first iteration of Google nearly 30 years ago.
A brief history of backlinks
In 1996, Sergey Brin and Larry Page set out to create a better search engine. Modern-day search engines, they believed, relied too heavily on keyword matching, which made it easy for advertisers to game the system and returned low-quality results. “Automated search engines that rely on keyword matching usually return too many low quality matches,” they wrote.
As the web rapidly expanded, there were too many documents to index, and keyword-based search engines were ill-equipped to surface the best, most relevant content. “Indeed, we want our notion of ‘relevant’ to only include the very best documents since there may be tens of thousands of slightly relevant documents.”
From their dorm room, Brin and Page developed a new kind of search engine, one that ranked content based on authority, determined by the pages linking to it. “In particular, link structure…and link text provide a lot of information for making relevance judgments and quality filtering.”
The idea is quite simple: If a lot of other pages link to yours, especially using relevant anchor text, your page must be good. They called this new search engine Goog…BackRub.
Two years later they renamed it Google, and ever since, backlinks have been a cornerstone of SEO. Soon, a new industry emerged centered around linkbuilding, which refers to the practice of acquiring backlinks to boost rankings. Some cheated and took shortcuts, creating link farms and link exchanges and mass-producing backlinks from anywhere and everywhere, prioritizing quantity over quality.
Google caught on and cracked down on sites with spammy backlinks. It introduced the rel=nofollow attribute in 2005 to combat comment spam, where users would drop links in blog comments to boost their rankings. In 2012, the Penguin update targeted webspam including blackhat link schemes, and many other algorithm updates since have continued to address how Google evaluates links.
SEOs adjusted, shifting focus to building quality, relevant backlinks instead of spammy, irrelevant links.
Are backlinks still important for law firm SEO?
Backlinks still matter. Backlinko analyzed millions of Google search results to evaluate which factors correlate with better rankings. They found that 95% of pages have no backlinks at all, and those with more backlinks tended to rank higher in the search results.
Yet, Google challenges the notion that more links means better rankings.
In 2021, Google’s John Mueller cautioned that focusing on the total number of links to your website is the wrong approach. “From my point of view, I would tend not to focus on the total number of links to your site, or the total number of domain links to your website, because we look at links in a very different way,” he said.
Rather, Google evaluates the relevance of links. “[T]here could be one really good link from one website out there that is, for us, a really important sign that we should treat this website as something that is relevant because it has that one link.” The total number of links, he added, “is completely irrelevant.”
A year later, Mueller suggested links would become less important over time. “Well, it’s something where I imagine, over time, the weight on the links at some point will drop off a little bit as we can figure out a little bit better how the content fits in within the context of the whole web.”
And in 2024, he replied to a Reddit user concerned that Google Search Console and Ahrefs were showing different backlink counts for his website. Mueller explained that third-party crawls are different than Google’s, so their data will vary. But more importantly, he reiterated that “over-focusing on links will often result in you wasting your time doing things that don’t make your website better overall.”
Some SEOs take what Google says about backlinks with a grain of salt. But whether you trust Google’s messaging or not, Mueller’s advice aligns with that of most SEOs: prioritizing sheer quantity over quality can lead to low-value links that not only provide little benefit but also divert attention from more critical aspects of a sustainable, long-term SEO strategy. Backlinks should be natural, relevant, and, whenever possible, come from authoritative referring domains.
What are referring domains?
In simple terms, a domain is a website’s name. Our domain, for example, is wedoweb.com. A referring domain is any website that links to yours. No matter how many times a single website links to yours, whether just once or 1,000 times, it’ll count as one referring domain.
That brings up an important concept: the diminishing value of backlinks from the same domain. One backlink from a high-authority website carries a good deal of weight. But by the time you’ve earned your 500th link from that same website, its impact is less meaningful.
That’s why diversifying your link-building efforts is crucial. Don’t focus on earning multiple backlinks from a handful of super-high-authority domains. Not only can that look suspicious to search engines, but it also limits your potential to acquire backlinks from other domains.
Instead, build backlinks from a wide range of relevant, authoritative domains. Be mindful, though, that some domains use only no-follow links when linking to other websites.
Are no-follow links helpful?
A no-follow link is a link that a website tells Google not to follow. In other words, the rel=nofollow attribute tells Google not consider the link as a vote of confidence from the linking page to the linked-to page.
Why would a website add the rel=nofollow attribute to a link? Often, it’s because the site doesn’t want to endorse the page it’s linking to. Think about it like this: if you’re writing an article for your law firm’s website about an organization accused of harming others, you wouldn’t want to pass your site’s authority onto the organization alleged to have harmed others.
Directories often use no-follow links too, protecting them from the appearance of favoring or endorsing the businesses included in the directory.
There’s no law requiring Google to ignore no-follow links. In fact, Google has stated that its algorithm still recognizes these links but treats them more as “hints” rather than ranking signals. They’re a sort of second-tier link, carrying less weight than traditional do-follow links.
So, are no-follow backlinks worth pursuing? Generally, yes. If they’re relevant and provide opportunities for users to find your website, they can still provide value. And even if they don’t directly bring in new clients, no-follow links from high-authority sources can serve as useful signals.
How can law firms build backlinks to their website?
Remember, linkbuilding is a long game. Shortcuts or one-month linkbuilding sprints won’t match the results you’ll get from sustained, strategic effort. Here are some ways law firms can build backlinks to their websites.
Add your law firm to directories
Start with the basics. If you have citations in legal directories, you’ve already built backlinks to your website. Many of these directories have high authority, though most of their links are no-follow. Here are some of the most common directories to establish foundational backlinks.
- Justia
- FindLaw
- SuperLawyers
- Nolo
- Yelp
- Avvo
- Better Business Bureau
- Yellow Pages
Create something awesome and promote it
Make something so helpful, so interesting, so thought-provoking that other websites want to link to it.
- Do some original research, such as by analyzing publicly available data like auto accident statistics in your community, and offer your perspective or a unique insight.
- Share your thoughts on a current legal topic, such as when Florida updated its tort laws to adopt a modified comparative negligence model.
- Write a whitepaper sharing insight relevant to your area of expertise, such as how the emergence of a new technology like self-driving cars might affect liability claims.
In other words, create something that other websites will find useful to share with their audience or reference in their own content.
Find guest post opportunities
Guest blogging is an older strategy, and while some abused it by spinning up low-quality content that’s wholly irrelevant to the other website’s audience, it’s still an effective strategy when done right. If you write valuable, relevant content for another website’s audience, guest blogging could be a great way to earn a high-quality backlink.
Get involved in your local community
Sponsoring events, volunteering, or otherwise actively participating in your community can earn locally relevant backlinks. Here are some ideas:
- Sponsor a little league team or an event at a local school.
- Volunteer for a good cause in your community.
- Host a legal clinic.
- Speak at a local business event.
Many of those organizations and events will feature your law firm on their websites and provide a valuable local backlink.
Distribute press releases (when you have something to share)
Write and distribute press releases when you have something important to share. In the past, some SEOs abused the press release for minor updates, but they still hold value when you’re sharing truly newsworthy information about your firm, such as:
- Winning big for a client
- Your precedent-setting case
- Hiring a new attorney who expands your practice’s expertise
- Earning an award or recognition, whether for your law firm or a lawyer at your firm
- Community events you sponsor or participate in
- Announcing a new scholarship or scholarship winner
- Opining on a recent product recall or mass tort
- Commenting on a recent law change
Improve your SEO performance
Pages ranking highly in the search results tend to attract more backlinks. So, while earning backlinks could help improve how your pages rank in the search results, simply ranking higher can naturally acquire more backlinks.
A 2018 analysis by Ahrefs found that top-ranking pages acquire new backlinks at a higher rate than pages ranking lower on page one of the search results.
It’s a pattern that makes sense. Websites that create good content are more likely to earn backlinks. High-quality content on a site with a strong backlink profile is more likely to rank well in search results. Because it ranks highly, more people discover it. And because it’s valuable content, more of those people link to it.
Ahrefs called it the “vicious circle of SEO.”
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Alex Valencia is an influential entrepreneur, marketer, speaker, podcaster, and CEO of We Do Web Content, one of Inc. 5000’s fastest-growing businesses in America. His agency implements game-changing content marketing strategies and produces top-ranking web content for law firms, medical professionals, and small businesses nationwide.